UC-NRLF 


fl07    Lflfl 


R1TTGR 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS 


COMPLIMENTS  OF  WM.  E.  RITTER 
Studies  along  the  way 


BOOKS    BY 
WILLIAM    EMERSON     RITTER 

THE  HIGHER  USEFULNESS  OF  SCIENCE. 
THE  PROBABLE  INFINITY  OF  NATURE 
AND  LIFE. 

THE  UNITY  OF  THE  ORGANISM,  OR 
THE  ORGANISMAL  CONCEPTION  OF 
LIFE.  Two  Volumes.  Illustrated. 
THE  UNITY  OF  THE  ORGANIC  SPECIES, 
WITH  SPECIAL  REFERENCE  TO  THE 
HUMAN  SPECIES. 

WAR,   SCIENCE  AND  CIVILIZATION. 
AN     ORGANISMAL     CONCEPTION     OF 
CONSCIOUSNESS. 

RICHARD  G. BADGER,  PUBLISHER,  BOSTON 


AN  ORGANISMAL  THEORY 
OF  CONSCIOUSNESS 


BY 

WILLIAM  EMERSON  HITTER 

Director  of  the  Scrippa  Institution  for 

Biological  Research  of  the  University 

of  California,  La  Jolla 

California 


BOSTON 

RICHARD  G.  BADGER 

THE   GORHAM   PRESS 


LIBRARY 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY  RICHARD  G.  BADGER 


All  Rights  Reserved 


Made  in  the  United  States  of  America 


The  Gorham  Press,  Boston,  U.  S.  A. 


EXPLANATORY  NOTE 

This  book  is  a  reprint,  with  a  few  verbal  changes  neces- 
sitated by  its  mechanical  isolation,  of  the  last  chapter 
(twenty-four),  the  preface,  and  the  postscript  of  my  larger 
work,  The  Unity  of  the  Organism,  or  The  Organismal 
Conception  of  Life.  The  title  of  the  chapter  is,  Sketch 
of  an  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  and  I  wish  to 
emphasize  the  avowedly  brief  treatment  of  the  subject  as 
indicated  by  the  term  "sketch." 

My  reason  for  publishing  this  much  of  The  Unity  as  a 
separate  book  is  strategical.  I  hope  the  move  will  con- 
tribute to  the  winning  of  earlier  and  wider  attention  to 
the  full  treatise  by  two  groups  of  students  especially: 
Philosophers  who  have  broken  away  from  subjectivist  ideal- 
ism ;  and  physiologists  who  have  deeply  sensed  the  meaning 
of  physical  chemistry  in  its  application  to  living  beings. 
To  win  more  readers  for  the  full  work  is  my  hope.  And 
should  the  thing  happen  which  I  realize  is  possible,  to  wit, 
the  usurpation  by  this  chapter,  which  is  primarily  hypo- 
thetical, of  the  place  rightfully  belonging  to  the  entire  book, 
which  as  a  whole  is  quite  the  reverse  of  hypothetical,  I 
should  be  chagrined  indeed. 

But  I  am  counting  on  an  influence  even  stronger  than 
the  sense  of  fairness  and  consistency  of  students  as  a  guaran- 
tee against  such  an  outcome.  It  seems  to  me  western  civil- 
ization is  entering  on  an  era  in  which  integrative  concep- 
tions and  forces  are  going  to  determine  the  feelings,  the 
thoughts  and  the  acts  of  men  much  more  than  they  have 
for  the  past  three-quarters  of  a  century.  Already  tenden- 
cies of  this  can  hardly  be  mistaken  in  industry,  in  labor, 
in  sociology  and  in  government. 

3 


4  Explanatory  Note 

Science,  philosophy  and  religion  have  not  as  yet  shown 
much  of  this  tendency.  Specialization,  particularly  in  the 
material  sciences,  differentiation,  analysis,  separatism,  and 
isolation  have  dominated  in  these  realms.  Herbert  Spencer 
did  indeed  move  nominally  toward  philosophic  and  scientific 
unification.  But  his  synthetic  philosophy,  so-called,  par- 
takes really  more  of  the  nature  of  a  department  store  than 
of  a  truly  synthesized  body  of  natural  knowledge. 

Spencer  failed  in  his  effort  to  make  Evolution  function 
as  a  universally  synthesizing  principle  for  the  simple  reason 
that  he  failed  to  perceive  the  fundamentally  integrative  na- 
ture of  the  evolutionary  process  itself. 

My  enterprise  as  a  whole,  viewed  as  one  in  which  the  idea 
of  synthesis  occupies  a  central  place,  may  be  stated  thus : 
So  far  as  concerns  all  that  vast  expanse  of  living  nature 
which  comes  under  natural  history  as  understood  by  Charles 
Darwin  and  his  immediate  predecessors  and  contemporaries, 
my  conception  of  biointegration  is  set  forth  descriptively  and 
factually,  and  with  a  very  minimum  of  hypothesis  in  the 
chapters  preceding  the  last  (the  twenty- fourth)  of  The 
Unity  of  the  Organism.  The  discussion  of  psychic  inte- 
gration (chapters  twenty-three  and  twenty-four)  presents 
the  relevant  facts  in  such  fashion  as  to  demonstrate,  I  be- 
lieve, a  connection  between  mind  and  body  which  leaves  no 
ground  for  the  doctrine  of  psycho-physical  parallelism  to 
stand  on. 

The  causal  hypothesis  of  psychic  phenomena  sketched  in 
the  chapter  here  presented  is  one  which  links  the  animal 
organism  more  closely  and  positively  with  inorganic  nature 
than  any  with  which  I  am  acquainted. 

The  proof  or  disproof  of  that  hypothesis  is  dependent  on 
psychology  and  biochemistry,  primarily.  Hence  my  pur- 
pose in  making  this  chapter  into  a  separate  book  may  be 
stated  more  specifically  as  that  of  hastening  the  proof  or 
disproof  of  my  hypothesis  of  consciousness. 


Explanatory  Note  5 

But  while  the  wish  to  promote  the  scrutiny  and  test  of 
this  hypothesis  is  my  main  object,  another  object  which 
attaches  itself  to  this  is  hardly  less  interesting  to  me. 

I  refer  to  the  question  of  what  effect  on  physical  and 
chemical  conceptions  themselves  the  application  of  physical 
chemistry  to  organic  beings  is  likely  to  have. 

If  my  surmise  that  physical  chemistry  itself  is  at  heart 
hostile  to  atomism  as  materialistic  metaphysics  conceives  it, 
is  justified,  a  still  more  rigorous  application  of  it  to  bio- 
logical phenomena,  and  especially  in  the  psychical  domain, 
is  likely  to  reveal  that  hostility  more  and  more. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

EXPLANATOKY  NOTE 3 

PREFACE   (To  "The  Unity  of  the  Organism") 9 

AN  ORGANISMAL  THEORY  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS 25 

Remarks  on  the  Hypothetical  Character  of  this  Chapter     ...  25 

The  Natural  History  Method  and  the  Study  of  One's  Self     ...  25 

Formulation  of  the  Central  Hypothesis 29 

Preliminary  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis  as  Such 30 

More  Systematic  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis 34 

The  Nature  of  "Outer"  or  Objective,  and  "Inner"  or  Subjective     .  35 

As  to  the  Lowest  Terms  of  Self-Consciousness 51 

Instinct  and  Physical  Organization 53 

Emotion  and  Physical  Organization 59 

Glance  at  the  Equilibrative  Interaction  Between  "  Body ' '  and  "  Soul "  66 

Support  of  the  Hypothesis  by  the  Physico- Chemical  Conception  of 

the  Organism 67 

Personality  and  Elementary  Chemical  Substances 70 

On  the  Psychology  of  Subjective  and  Objective  Personality     ...  74 

Personality  and  the  "Breath  of  Life"  Viewed  in  the  Light  of  Physical 

Chemistry  of  the  Organism 79 

Summed-up  Statement  of  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis     ...  92 

REFERENCE  INDEX 93 

POSTSCRIPT    (To  "The  Unity  of  the  Organism") 95 

INDEX  .  103 


PREFACE 

(TO  "THE  UNITY  OF  THE  ORGANISM") 
right  of  any  book  to  live  must  be  determined  finally 
A  by  what  is  on  its  pages.  Nevertheless,  when  the  author 
of  a  scientific  book  undertakes  such  a  task  as  I  have  under- 
taken in  this  one,  his  natural  and  acquired  fitness  for  carry- 
ing out  his  project  ought  to  count  in  some  measure  toward 
the  determination.  An  attempt  to  speak  with  some  degree 
of  originality  and  authority  on  subjects  so  remote  from  one 
another  as  are  the  chemistry  of  organisms,  heredity,  human 
consciousness,  and  the  nature  of  knowledge,  would  be  some- 
what audacious  even  if  made  by  an  author  of  secure  reputa- 
tion as  an  investigator  in  one  or  more  of  these  fields.  When, 
however,  the  attempt  is  that  of  a  complete  stranger  to  all 
the  fields,  as  thus  judged,  the  attempt  is  no  longer  entitled 
to  be  called  "somewhat  audacious."  It  is  audacious  out  and 
out,  and  if  defensible  at  all  is  defensible  in  spite  of  its 
audacity.  But  the  very  nature  of  the  task  I  have  attempted 
seems  to  require  me  to  contend  that  while  it  is  audacious  it 
is  yet  not  impossible,  and  to  point  out  something  of  my  own 
qualifications  for  performing  it. 

Such  professional  fitness  as  I  have  rests  primarily  on  my 
being  a  general  zoologist  in  the  proper  sense ;  that  is,  a 
student  of  the  phenomena  of  the  animal  world  without  ex- 
clusion of  any  aspect  of  that  world  from  professional  in- 
terest and  some  measure  of  professional  attention.  These 
facts  of  my  vocation,  and  of  my  conception  of  the  nature  of 
that  vocation  are  crucial  for  the  quality  not  only  of  this 
book  but  all  my  general  writings. 

If  once  one  becomes  as  deeply  convinced  as  I  am  of  both 
the  fundamental  unity  and  the  fundamental  diversity  of  al] 

9 


10  Preface 

nature;  if,  in  other  words,  he  becomes  convinced  that  the 
whole  of  nature  is,  indeed,  and  not  in  mere  expression,  a 
system,  the  conviction  will  carry  with  it  the  perception  that 
all  specialized  natural  knowledge  is  absolutely  dependent  for 
meaning  on  the  relation  it  has  to  its  appropriate  larger  body 
of  knowledge.  Either  analytic  knowledge  or  synthetic  knowl- 
edge of  nature  would  be  wholly  void  of  meaning  were  it  to 
be  completely  wrenched  from  the  other.  Most  men  of 
science  perhaps,  and  most  philosophers  probably,  would  ad- 
mit that  this  is  true  as  an  abstract  proposition.  But  what 
about  its  truth  when  brought  to  the  test  of  particular  cases  ? 

The  audacity  of  my  enterprise  really  consists  in  my  at- 
tempting to  act  according  to  this  general  truth  in  a  par- 
ticular case — the  case,  that  is,  of  the  phenomena  of  animal 
life.  I  have  gone  on  the  assumption  that  knowledge  of 
animal  chemistry,  for  example,  at  one  extreme,  and  of 
human  consciousness  at  the  other,  would  be  simple  blanks  as 
to  meaning  but  for  the  relation  of  the  two  knowledges  to 
each  other  and  to  still  more  general  knowledge  of  animal 
life.  Could  we  imagine  a  chimpanzee  possessed  of  as  much 
laboratory  knowledge  of  organic  chemistry  as  an  Emil 
Fischer,  that  knowledge  would  be  really  meaningless  were 
the  creature's  mind  that  of  a  chimpanzee  in  all  other  re- 
spects. 

A  systematic  defense  of  a  conception  of  zoology  based  on 
a  general  theory  of  natural  knowledge  such  as  this,  can  not, 
of  course,  be  thought  of  in  a  preface.  Indeed,  such  a  con- 
ception can  not  be  fully  justified  by  any  argument  merely 
•for  it.  The  justification  must  be  found  largely  in  a  worked- 
out  application  of  the  conception  itself.  In  other  words,  the 
very  fabric  of  this  book  must  be  the  chief  justification 
sought.  All  I  can  wish  to  do  in  a  preface  is  to  mention 
certain  subsidiary  ideas  and  principles  that  have  been  spe- 
cially influential  in  determining  the  plans  of  my  undertaking ; 
and  certain  methods  and  disciplinary  preparations  and  pres- 


Preface  11 

ent  conditions  that  have  been  specially  useful  in  carrying 
them  out. 

Probably  no  one  zoological  item  has  influenced  me  more 
than  the  perception  that  the  evolutionary  interpretation  of 
man  does  not  mean  that  man's  derivation  from  the  lower 
animals  made  him  something  that  is  now  not  animal.  It 
means  that  man  is  just  as  much  an  animal  to-day  as  were 
his  prehuman  ancestors.  The  truth  is  exactly  stated  by 
saying  that  when  the  transformation  took  place  by  which 
man  came  into  existence  that  transformation  was  from  a 
lower  to  a  higher  stage  of  animal  life.  The  actual  problem, 
consequently,  of  man's  nature  is  not  as  to  what  man  is  in 
opposition  to  animals,  but  as  to  the  kind,  or  species  of  ani- 
mal he  is. 

With  the  distinction  here  made  once  fully  grasped  comes 
the  revelation  that  man  is  an  object  of  zoological  research 
and  treatment  no  less  certainly  than  is  a  horse,  a  fish,  a 
lobster,  or  an  amoeba.  But  since  man's  highest,  that  is  his 
psychical  or  spiritual  attributes  are  the  ones  most  decisive 
of  his  kind,  it  is  these  attributes  which  make  him  particularly 
interesting,  zoologically  speaking — just  as,  for  example,  it 
is  the  attributes  of  a  horse  as  a  horse,  and  not  as  an  animal 
generally  that  elicits  our  particular  interest  in  the  horse. 
Zoology  rightly  understood  is  preeminent  among  all  the 
sciences  as  the  science  of  particulars.  This  important  truth 
seems  to  have  been  first  appreciated  by  Aristotle;  and  the 
fact  that  one  of  the  most  fundamental  differences  between 
him  and  his  teacher,  Plato,  concerned  the  doctrine  of  Par- 
ticulars as  opposed  to  that  of  Universals,  is  probably  con- 
nected closely  with  Aristotle's  great  interest  in  and  attention 
to  zoology.  I  have  not  seen  any  reference  to  this  surmise 
by  writers  on  Aristotle  and  his  philosophy,  yet  it  appears 
to  me  highly  significant. 

From  these  perceptions  relative  to  the  nature  of  man  and 
the  science  of  animal  life,  it  follows  that  when  the  zoological 


12  Preface 

study  of  man  is  undertaken — when  the  general  zoologist 
becomes  for  the  time  being  an  anthropological  zoologist — 
all  the  best  tested  and  most  approved  methods  of  that 
science  are  taxed  to  their  uttermost,  simply  because  of  the 
great  complexity  of  the  species  under  examination.  Now  it 
is  absolutely  beyond  question,  I  believe,  that  of  the  methods 
employed  in  the  biological  sciences,  none  are  more  important, 
especially  for  the  study  of  man,  than  those  of  description 
and  classification  with  their  necessary  accompaniment,  com- 
parison. The  essay  The  Place  of  Description,  Definition  and 
Classification  in  Philosophical  Biology  in  my  little  book,  The 
Higher  Usefulness  of  Science,  treats  of  this  subject  some- 
what at  length.  But  that  to  which  I  attach  much  more 
importance  is  that  almost  everything  contained  in  the  pres- 
ent book,  except  the  heart  of  Chapter  24,  I  regard  as  an 
embodiment  of  the  fundamental  principles  of  descriptive  and 
classificatory  biology  as  these  principles  are  established  by 
modern  research. 

It  seems  to  me  I  am  privileged  to  claim  that  no  reader  of 
this  and  other  general  writings  of  mine  is  in  position  to  pass 
judgment  on  them,  except,  of  course,  as  touching  trustworthi- 
ness of  observation  and  statement,  and  of  dependability  of 
authorities  cited,  without  having  considered  conscientiously 
my  position  as  to  method.  For  instance,  am  I  right  or  wrong 
in  holding  (see  the  above  mentioned  essay)  that  far  the 
larger  part  of  what  is  usually  called  explanation  in  dealing 
with  the  phenomena  of  nature  is  really  partial  or  tentative 
or  hypothetical  description  and  classification?  What  justi- 
fication and  scope  are  there  for  my  contention  that  the  motto 
"neglect  nothing,"  which  has  long  done  good  service  in  taxo- 
nomic  research  based  on  morphology,  must  be  extended  to 
all  departments  of  structural  and  functional  biology?  Wha 
grounding  and  applicability  are  there  for  my  distinction 
between  synoptic  and  analytic  description,  and  synoptic  am 
analytic  classification?  Not  untU  one  has  come  to  see  that 


Preface  13 

questions  of  this  sort  are  necessary  consequences  of  progress 
in  information  about,  and  interpretation  of  living  nature, 
is  he  able  to  appreciate  fully  what  I  mean  by  chemical  and 
psychological  zoology.  Formal  biochemistry  and  animal 
psychology,  that  is,  the  chemistry  and  the  psychology  of 
laboratories  devoted  to  these  subjects,  are  to  my  zoological 
eyes  really  quite  incidental  and  partial  and  crude,  albeit 
immensely  important.  Let  one  once  feel  the  full  weight  of 
the  inductive  evidence  favorable  to  the  hypothesis  that  every 
organism  whatever  performs  every  jot  and  tittle  of  its  ac- 
tivities through  chemico-physical  agencies,  and  he  must  at 
the  same  time  feel  the  meagerness  and  crudity,  compara- 
tively speaking,  of  even  the  fullest  and  best  laboratory 
knowledge  of  those  agencies  by  which  he  himself,  let  us  say, 
operates  as  he  carries  through  and  expresses  in  words  an 
argument  like  that  now  occupying  us. 

The  absolute  trustworthiness  of  the  main  findings  of 
laboratory  biochemistry  and  its  incalculably  great  impor- 
tance, but  at  the  same  time  its  great  imperfection  as  com- 
pared with  natural  biochemistry,  are  what  especially  impress 
me  as  I  bring  my  best  powers  to  bear  on  the  deepest,  most 
distinctive  problems  of  anthropological  zoology;  problems, 
in  other  words,  of  the  human  animal. 

Such  an  attitude  toward  biochemistry  will,  I  hope,  be 
recognized  even  by  biochemists  as  calculated  to  induce  at 
least  a  receptive  frame  of  mind  toward  knowledge  in  this 
domain.  It  should  be  one  important  qualification  for  "read- 
ing up"  in  the  domain.  But  certain  it  is  that  something 
more  than  a  receptive  mind  is  essential  to  enable  one  disci- 
plined in  one  field  of  science  to  be  a  successful  gleaner  of 
ripened  fruit  in  another  field.  It  is  not  true  that  all  the 
domains  of  natural  knowledge,  highly  developed  as  they  now 
are,  are  enough  alike  to  make  training  in  any  one  an  ade- 
quate preparation  for  acquiring  second  hand  knowledge  in 
every  other.  At  least  a  background  of  systematic  instruc- 


14  Preface 

tion  in  a  particular  science  is  requisite  to  make  a  highly 
successful  reader  even  in  that  science. 

So  far,  then,  as  I  am  able  to  pass  upon  my  own  quali- 
fication for  making  such  use  as  I  have  made  of  biochemistry, 
it  is  a  question  of  whether  I  have  a  sufficient  ground-work 
of  formal  training  to  make  me  a  safe  chooser  among  authori- 
ties and  estimater  of  the  significance  of  their  results. 

Although  my  chemical  practice  was  limited  to  three  years, 
one  of  these  as  a  student  assistant,  so  much  did  I  live  in  the 
laboratories  during  that  period,  that  even  to-day  the  open- 
ing of  a  book  or  journal  on  chemistry  seems  to  fill  my  nose 
with  foul  though  pleasantly  reminiscent  odors  and  to  en- 
crust and  stain  my  fingers  with  diverse  corrosives — all  of 
which  may  mean  that  I  was  more  a  musser  in  chemicals  than 
a  real  student  of  chemistry.  Nevertheless  I  verily  believe 
the  experience  enabled  me  to  be  a  more  intelligent  reader  of 
chemical  writings. 

As  for  the  science  of  mind,  I  am  obliged  to  own  that  I 
have  never  spent  a  day  in  an  experimental  laboratory  of 
either  animal  behavior  or  human  psychology.  But  I  own 
also  that  for  this  I  am  not  regretful  if  such  defect  of  train- 
ing be  an  essential  condition  of  escape  from  the  narrowing 
of  interest  in  and  conception  of  "behavior"  which  has  at- 
tended later  work  in  this  field.  I  do  not  believe,  however,  that 
this  is  the  only  way  of  such  escape.  Zoologists  must  realize 
before  long,  I  am  quite  sure,  that  laboratory  experimentation 
in  animal  behavior  can  be  only  a  rather  minor  agent  for  the 
task  of  understanding  the  psychical  life  of  the  animal  world 
as  a  whole. 

This  leads  to  the  remark  I  wish  to  make  about  the  discus- 
sion of  psychic  integration  in  the  last  chapters  of  this  book. 
One  of  the  most  important  things  accomplished  by  that  dis- 
cussion is,  I  estimate,  the  calling  attention  to  the  tendency 
of  instinctive  activity  to  excessiveness  over  the  actual  needs 
served  by  the  activity.  Why  has  this  truth  (for  there  can 


Preface  15 

be  no  question  that  it  is  a  truth)  not  received  more  atten- 
tion from  modern  behavior  specialists?  There  are  probably 
several  reasons,  but  a  particularly  influential  one  seems  to  be 
the  fact  that  the  very  purpose,  and  the  method  of  experimen- 
tation involving  the  idea  of  control  by  the  student  are 
such  as  to  encourage  overlooking  the  phenomena,  and  to 
obscure  their  significance  even  if  they  are  noticed. 

Unorthodoxly  enough  from  the  standpoint  of  present 
school  psychology,  my  entrance  into  this  realm  was  from 
the  side  of  the  nature  and  the  theory  of  knowledge.  And  so 
far  as  my  explorations  in  the  realm  have  gone,  two  men, 
Aristotle  and  the  late  Professor  G.  H.  Howison  have  influ- 
enced me  so  vitally  that  I  must  say  a  few  words  on  the 
subject. 

For  many  years  Aristotle  was  two  distinct  persons  to  me, 
so  far  as  any  real  influence  upon  my  thinking  was  con- 
cerned. On  the  one  hand  there  was  Aristotle  the  metaphysi- 
cian to  whom  I  had  been  formally  introduced  by  Howison  in 
a  private  outside-of-hours  University  course  (which  with 
great  generosity  he  had  given  me),  the  medium  of  the  in- 
troduction being  the  De  Anima.  On  the  other  hand  was 
Aristotle  the  zoologist,  acquaintance  with  whom  was  at  first 
picked  up  in  the  usual  naturalist  fashion,  but  which  had 
later  ripened  into  intimacy,  as  I  like  to  characterize  it,  by 
our  common  interest  in  marine  zoology,  his  good  description 
of  the  anatomy  of  a  tunicate  being  a  special  passport  to  my 
affection.  It  would  hardly  be  an  exaggeration  to  say  that 
all  my  philosophizing  in  biology  has  aimed  at  fusing  these 
two  Aristotles  into  one.  I  do  not  mean  that  this  has  been 
my  conscious  and  express  aim.  It  has  been  so  only  instinc- 
tively, or  intuitively,  or  "at  heart,"  or  by  "working  hy- 
pothesis," or  by  whatever  expression  one  chooses  for  it. 
And  here  comes  the  part  played  by  Professor  Howison :  As 
I  take  a  bird's  eye  view  now  of  what  is  set  forth  in  this  and 
other  general  writings  of  mine,  and  contemplate  the  whole  in 


16  Preface 

the  light  of  the  preface  to  Howison's  book,  The  Limits  of 
Evolution,  and  then  look  reflectively  back  over  my  thirty 
years  of  contact  with  him  and  his  teachings,  most  of  it  inci- 
dental and  fitful,  but  some  of  it  rather  close,  a  few  influences 
of  his,  some  positive  and  some  negative,  stand  out  sharply 
indeed.  The  positive  influences  I  mention  first.  No  other 
influence  contributed  so  much  to  my  belief  in  the  power  of 
reason ;  that  is,  in  a  substratum  of  truth  to  the  idealistic 
philosophy.  Again  no  other  influence  contributed  more  to 
my  belief  in  persons — in  the  power  of  personality;  that  is, 
in  a  substratum  of  truth  to  the  Howisonian  philosophy  of 
personal  idealism. 

A  statement  of  the  negative  influence  coming  from  the 
same  source  takes  us  back  to  Aristotle.  In  the  preface  to 
The  Limits  of  Evolution  Howison  writes,  referring  to  his 
own  theory  of  Personal  Idealism,  "The  character  of  the 
present  theory,  relatively  to  Aristotle,  is  to  be  found  in  its 
attempt  to  carry  out  the  individualistic  tendencies  in  Aris- 
totelianism  to  a  conclusion  consistently  coherent."  This 
statement  I  could  almost  adopt  word  for  word  as  a  charac- 
terization of  the  purpose  that  has  animated  all  my  general 
thinking  and  writing.  Yet  how  profoundly  does  the  out- 
come of  my  efforts  differ  from  that  resulting  from  Profes- 
sor Howison's  efforts !  And  here  is  the  kernel  of  my  present 
remarks:  In  commending  to  me  the  De  Anima  of  Aristotle 
and  generously  undertaking  to  guide  me  through  it,  as  a 
response  to  my  appeal  for  help  toward  clarifying  my  mind 
concerning  the  deeper,  the  philosophical  meaning  of  bio- 
logical evolution,  my  greatly  learned  and  much  esteemed 
teacher  had  a  purpose,  I  am  now  quite  sure,  that  is  impos- 
sible of  realization.  That  purpose  was  to  show  that  Aris- 
totle failed  in  his  effort  to  recognize  a  "real  world"  through 
combining  "ideal  form"  with  "real  matter,"  because  for  him 
a  real  world  was  more  fundamentally  a  sense-experienceable 
world  than  is  actually  the  case.  As  I  labored  through  the 


Preface  17 

De  Anima  I  recall  that  I  was  disturbed  by  the  rather  cavalier 
fashion  in  which  we  disposed  of  those  portions  of  the  work 
which  treat  of  reproduction,  nutrition  and  growth,  and  espe- 
cially the  portions  dealing  with  the  senses.  At  the  stage 
of  scientific  development  I  was  then  in,  I  knew  little  or  noth- 
ing of  Aristotle's  biological  writings,  and  Howison  referred 
to  them  only  in  the  most  cursory  way,  if  indeed  he  men- 
tioned them  at  all.  Certain  it  is  he  did  nothing  to  arouse 
my  interest  in  them,  or  to  indicate  that  he  regarded  them 
as  specially  significant  in  connection  with  such  important 
views  of  Aristotle's  as  those  on  the  relation  of  Body  and 
Soul.  The  question  which  now  seems  to  me  indispensable 
for  grasping  the  essense  of  the  Aristotelian  psychology  and 
philosophy  that,  namely,  of  why  Aristotle  was  so  greatly  in- 
terested in  zoology,  and  devoted  so  much  time  to  its  study, 
never  came  up  during  the  course,  I  am  quite  sure.  In  sci- 
ence and  philosophy  as  in  everything  else,  the  character  of 
one's  interests  is  a  surer  index  to  his  general  views  and  atti- 
tude than  is  anything  he  can  express  verbally.  There  may 
be  ambiguity  and  error  in  Aristotle's  theory  of  "synthetic 
Entelechy."  This  theory  may,  probably  does,  "beset,"  as 
Howison  remarks,  "all  individual  existence  both  behind  and 
before,"  thereby  implying  some  theoretical  derogation  from 
the  real  nature  of  personality.  But  over  against  this  error 
and  ambiguity  stands  indubitable  proof  of  Aristotle's  prac- 
tical faith  in  the  Particular,  the  Individual,  that  proof  be- 
ing the  vast  labor  he  expended  in  learning  and  interpreting 
the  life  of  the  animal  world.  The  chief  philosophic  signifi- 
cance of  Aristotle's  zoological  works  is  not  in  any  informa- 
tion or  theories  they  contain  but  in  the  fact  that  he  pro- 
duced them  at  all,  since,  as  mentioned  above,  zoology  is  pre- 
eminent as  the  science  of  particulars,  and  his  doctrine  of 
Particulars  as  opposed  to  Universals  was  very  close  to  the 
heart  of  his  whole  philosophic  system. 

This  prepares  for  my  final  remark  about  the  influence  upon 


18  Preface 

my  thinking  of  Professor  Howison  and  the  idealistic  philoso- 
phy generally.  That  philosophic  Idealism,  no  matter  of 
what  variety,  contains  elements  that  are  fundamentally  er- 
roneous seems  to  me  to  be  proved  more  conclusively  by  its 
inadequacy  for  understanding  the  world  in  its  entirety  than 
by  any  particular  errors  of  fact  or  reasoning  which  it  can 
be  shown  to  contain.  Were  all  men  philosophical  idealists, 
there  would  be  no  natural  science,  merely  because  in  the 
domain  of  learning  men  will  not  choose  as  their  primary 
life  work  what  they  fully  believe  to  be  of  secondary  im- 
portance. 

Fallaciousness  or  inconclusiveness  of  argument  never  de- 
terred me  half  as  much  from  embracing  Professor  Howison's 
teachings  in  their  entirety  as  did  his  usually  dignified  but 
always-present  presumption  of  professional  self-superiority 
over  all  his  colleagues  who  did  not  come  under  the,  to  him, 
sacred  aegis  of  Philosophy.  The  reason  why  sincere  humility 
and  the  spirit  of  democracy  are  alien  to  all  forms  of  idealis- 
tic philosophy  becomes  clear  once  one  attains  a  world  view 
which  truly  strives  to  include,  but  makes  no  pretense  of  hav- 
ing already  included,  the  whole  world  wholly  in  that  view. 

There  remains  the  pleasant  though  difficult  task  of  men- 
tioning the  few  among  my  numberless  obligations  which  are 
so  personal  and  weighty  that  to  leave  them  unacknowledged 
would  be  to  brand  me  as  ungrateful,  more  conspicuously  than 
I  can  endure. 

First  as  to  those  persons  and  conditions  which,  during  the 
last  ten  years,  have  relieved  me  from  the  routine  duties  of  a 
University  teacher,  and  also  from  most  of  the  exactions 
customarily  attaching  to  an  administrative  post  even  in  an 
institution  of  scientific  research,  and  have  given  me  a  status 
the  central  purpose  of  which  is  scientific  work.  Whatever 
be  the  quality  and  final  significance  of  my  life-work,  could 
these,  I  ask  myself,  have  reached  as  high  a  level  as  they 
have  reached  had  I  not  come  into  my  present  position?  Al- 


Preface  19 

most  certainly  not,  must  be  the  answer.  And  beyond  a  doubt 
the  raising  of  the  question  involves  principles  of  organization 
for  scientific  research  that  lift  it  high  above  mere  personal 
concern. 

No  faith  of  mine  is  greater  because  none  is  rooted  more 
deeply  in  my  scientific  philosophy,  than  that  in  the  ultimate 
triumph  of  popular,  that  is  of  democratic  principles  in  all 
aspects  of  civilization.  Indeed  the  facts — not  the  theories — 
of  organic  unity  and  integration  which  have  dominated  all 
my  later  work  are  the  foundation  of  this  faith.  Whether 
my  particular  hypotheses  and  theories  of  organismalism  suc- 
ceed or  fail,  there  still  are  the  raw  data  on  which  they  rest. 
These  can  not  fail.  If  success  does  not  crown  my  efforts  in 
handling  the  data  it  will  crown  those  of  others  who  shall 
come  after  me.  And  when  the  principles  for  which  I  contend 
shall  have  worked  themselves  more  fully  into  the  fabric  of 
civilization,  the  organizational,  the  administrative,  and  the 
scientific  policies  aimed  at  in  the  Scripps  Institution  for  Bio- 
logical Research  of  the  University  of  California  will  be 
recognized  as  fundamentally  sound.  I  will  be  specific  here 
to  the  extent  of  mentioning  the  policy  of  providing  a  special 
business  management  for  such  institutions. 

Although  my  indebtedness  to  my  professional  co-workers 
and  official  associates  of  the  Zoological  Department  and  the 
Museum  of  Vertebrate  Zoology  at  Berkeley,  Professors  C.  A. 
Kofoid,  S.  J.  Holmes,  and  Dr.  Joseph  Grinnell,  is  indicated 
by  special  references  in  the  body  of  this  book,  I  should  be 
sorry  to  have  these  references  taken  to  indicate  the  full  ex- 
tent of  my  obligation  to  them,  or  to  indicate  that  these  are 
the  only  members  of  those  departments  to  whom  I  am  in- 
debted. 

It  would  be  a  source  of  keen  regret  to  me,  too,  should  my 
single  short  reference  to  two  of  my  biological  associates  on 
the  staff  of  the  Scripps  Institution,  Mr.  E.  L.  Michael  and 
Dr.  C.  O.  Esterly,  be  taken  as  the  full  measure  of  what  I 


20  Preface 

owe  to  them.  I  hope  that  my  reference  to  their  work,  brief 
though  it  is,  will  be  recognized  as  indicative  of  the  high  im- 
portance I  attach  to  what  they  have  done  and  are  doing. 

But  what  about  my  indebtedness  to  professional  associates 
here  in  the  home  group  of  whose  work  no  mention  is  made 
in  my  text?  How  subtle  and  far-reaching  and  innumerable 
are  the  influences  which  bear  upon  one  from  his  daily  co- 
workers  !  For  example,  by  what  unit  of  measurement  could 
be  gauged  the  effects  on  my  treatment  of  heredity,  which  have 
come  from  my  perpetual  contact  with  the  work  of  Dr.  F.  B. 
Sumner  and  Mr.  H.  H.  Collins  ?  But  these  men  would  prob- 
ably resent  the  ascription  to  them  of  responsibility  for  my 
main  conclusions  in  this  field.  Again,  not  many  "environ- 
mental factors"  have  been  more  determinative  of  my  present 
feelings  (I  hardly  dare  call  them  views)  relative  to  various 
problems  in  geo-physics,  and  relative  to  quantitative  meth- 
ods in  natural  science,  than  have  Dr.  G.  F.  McEwen  and  his 
oceanographic  work.  Yet  I  hesitate  even  to  mention  this 
fact  lest  some  one  be  led  thereby  to  hold  Dr.  McEwen  ac- 
countable for  crudities,  actual  or  implied,  I  may  manifest 
in  these  domains. 

Nor  are  my  indebtednesses  confined  to  the  narrow  circle 
of  my  immediately  professional  and  official  co-workers.  In- 
deed I  am  keenly  conscious  of  great  debts  beyond  this  circle. 
These  are  so  numerous  and  on  the  whole  so  general  as  to 
make  specification  impossible,  but  I  cannot  pass  by  without 
mentioning  my  debt  to  my  long-time  and  much-cherished 
friend,  Professor  G.  M.  Stratton,  for  the  commentaries  on 
the  chapters  on  psychic  integration  made  by  him  while  this 
portion  of  the  book  was  in  an  advanced  though  still  forma- 
tive stage. 

For  aid  in  structural  labor,  as  it  may  be  called,  my  de- 
pendence upon  Mr.  Frank  E.  A.  Thone,  my  secretary  and 
scientific  assistant,  has  been  varied  and  intimate,  and  of  a 
quality  for  which  money  can  only  partly  pay. 


Preface  21 

To  Dr.  Christine  Essenberg,  librarian  and  member  of  the 
scientific  staff  of  the  Scripps  Institution,  I  am  indebted  for 
help  on  the  index  and  glossary. 

And  finally,  what  can  I  say  about  the  part  played  in  the 
creation  of  this  and  my  other  works  by  her  to  whom  this 
volume  is  dedicated?  The  extent  to  which  her  life  is  involved 
with  mine  in  these  works  only  we  two  can  know;  but  the 
wording  of  my  dedication  indicates  something  of  the  char- 
acter of  that  involvement. 


AN  ORGANISMAL  THEORY 
OF  CONSCIOUSNESS 


AN  ORGANISMAL  THEORY  OF 
CONSCIOUSNESS 

Remarks  on  the  Hypothetical  Character  of  this  Chapter 

HYPOTHESIS  and  theory  will  dominate  in  the! task 
upon  which  we  now  enter  and  in  this  respect  the 
present  chapter  will  differ  sharply  from  the  preceding  chap- 
ters. Fact,  description,  classification,  and  restrained  gen- 
eralization have  been  the  leading  motives  up  to  this  point. 
One  main  and  several  subsidiary  hypotheses  will  be  central 
in  the  discussion.  Into  the  presence  of  these  will  be  sum- 
moned many  of  the  facts  and  generalizations  previously  set 
forth.  The  purpose  in  this  summoning  will  be  on  the  one 
hand  to  test  the  hypotheses  by  the  facts  and  generalizations 
and  on  the  other  hand  to  see  how  the  facts  will  look  in  the 
light  of  the  hypotheses. 

This  announcement  of  the  hypothetical  and  theoretical 
character  of  the  task  now  before  us,  will  give  us  two  advan- 
tages: It  will  justify  a  dogmatic  form  of  expression  at  times 
which  we  should  not  otherwise  feel  privileged  to  use;  and 
will  justify  a  brevity  of  treatment  which  would  not  be  pos- 
sible were  we  aiming  at  thorough  generalization  and  demon- 
stration. Hence  the  justification  of  undertaking  to  deal 
with  so  vast  and  vital  a  subject  in  the  limits  of  a  sketch. 

The  Natural  History  Method  and  the  Study  of  One's  Self 

Insistent  as  I  have  been  on  the  importance  of  the  natural 
history  way  of  approaching  the  phenomena  of  the  living 
world,  in  entering  upon  the  present  discussion  I  must  em- 

25 


£6  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

phasize  this  more  than  ever  and  must  call  attention  to  the 
particular  character  of  this  importance  in  our  present  un- 
dertaking. 

The  natural  history  method  of  viewing  organic  beings  is 
per  se  the  comprehensive  method,  one  of  its  best  mottos 
being,  as  we  have  repeatedly  seen,  "neglect  nothing."  That 
knowledge  of  organisms  separates  itself  sharply  into  de- 
partments is  no  deterrent  to  the  naturalist  against  utilizing 
any  knowledge  he  may  come  upon  that  will  contribute  to  his 
main  aim — that  of  understanding  organisms.  Who  or  what 
shall  restrain  me  from  observing  and  carefully  thinking 
about  any  fact  of  my  own  being  which  promises  to  help  me 
on  my  road  to  such  understanding?  The  foremost  zoolo- 
gists, of  modern  times  especially,  have  amply  recognized  and 
freely  used  this  principle  so  far  as  all  physical  and  some  of 
the  lower  psychical  attributes  are  concerned.  But  when  it 
comes  to  man's  higher  psychical  attributes,  zoologists  have 
usually  said,  sometimes  expressly,  sometimes  tacitly,  that 
these  belong  to  a  wholly  different  realm,  a  realm  with  which 
we  have  little  or  nothing  to  do.  And  their  position  of 
"hands  off"  as  touching  man's  higher  psychic  life,  has  re- 
ceived the  readier,  fuller  sanction  in  that  it  has  accorded 
well  with  the  prevalent  views  and  practices  of  those  students, 
anthropologists,  economists,  sociologists,  and  ethicists  who 
have  made  these  higher  reaches  of  human  life  their  special 
fields  of  inquiry.  But  the  course  of  nature  can  not  be  per- 
manently thwarted.  Such  an  attempt  to  wrench  human  life 
asunder  is  bound  to  fail  finally.  In  the  several  subdivisions 
of  biology,  normal  advance  has  tended  to  stay  the  wrenching 
process,  comparative  psychology  being  notable  in  this  ten- 
dency. 

The  opposition  to  such  organic  disunion  consistently 
maintained  throughout  this  book  reaches  its  culmination  in 
these  chapters  on  psychic  integration.  In  what  follows  we 
shall  pass  more  freely  than  ever  from  one  phase  or  aspect 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  27 

to  another,  over  the  entire  gamut  of  psychic  life  both  in  the 
individual  and  in  the  animal  kingdom.  If  facts  of  my  own 
subjective  life  will  serve  my  purpose,  I  shall  be  as  free  to 
requisition  them  as  to  requisition  facts  of  any  phase  or  as- 
pect of  my  objective  life.  If  the  ethical  or  esthetic  or  social 
attributes  of  the  human  animal  will  best  illuminate  a  point, 
these  shall  be  brought  in  with  as  little  misgiving  as  will  be 
anatomical  or  embryological  or  physiological  or  instinctive 
attributes. 

So  great  store  do  I  lay  on  this  catholicity  of  attitude 
toward  psychic  life,  that  I  shall  show  by  a  single  instance 
that  at  least  a  few  other  present-day  zoologists  have  some- 
what similar  feelings  about  the  zoological  character  of  psy- 
chical phenomena.  Referring  to  the  controversies  which 
have  inevitably  arisen  over  the  problem  of  instinct,  W.  M. 
Wheeler  says  that  such  controversy  "is  pardonable,  at  least 
to  some  extent,  since  the  subject  itself  presents  no  less  than 
four  aspects,  according  as  it  is  studied  from  the  ethological, 
physiological,  psychological  or  metaphysical  points  of  view." 
"From  the  first  two  of  these,"  the  author  continues,  "in- 
stinct is  open  to  objective  biological  study  in  the  form  of 
the  'instinct  actions.'  These  may  be  studied  by  the  physiol- 
ogist merely  as  a  regularly  coordinated  series  of  movements 
depending  on  changes  in  the  tissues  and  organs,  and  by  the 
ethologist  to  the  extent  that  they  tend  to  bring  the  organism 
into  effective  relationship  with  its  living  and  inorganic  en- 
vironment. But  that  these  movements  have  a  deeper  origin 
in  psychological  changes  may  be  inferred  on  the  basis  of 
analogy  from  our  own  subjective  experience  which  shows  us 
our  instincts  arising  as  impulses  and  cravings,  the  so-called 
'instinct- feelings* ;  and  these  in  turn  yield  abundant  material 
for  metaphysical  and  ethical  speculation."  x  From  the 
context  of  these  sentences  we  may  infer  that  Wheeler  rec- 
ognizes that  the  four  aspects  mentioned  under  which  the 
subject  of  instincts  presents  itself,  represent  the  same  num- 


£8  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

ber  of  valid  departments  of  man's  mental  life.  The  point 
I  wish  to  make  is  that  although  a  zoologist  may  recognize 
without  cavil  that  speculation  on  psychological,  ethical, 
and  metaphysical  problems  which  arise  in  connection  with 
instincts,  are  legitimate  activities  of  man,  and  might  prop- 
erly deny  that  it  is  incumbent  upon  him  to  do  much  specu- 
lating of  this  sort,  yet  it  would  be  incumbent  on  him  to  take 
due  cognizance  of  these  speculative  attributes  of  the  human 
animal.  A  truly  scientific  zoology  can  not  justify  itself  in 
issuing  a  manifesto  to  the  effect  that  certain  attributes  pre- 
sented by  some  animals  do  not  fall  within  its  province.  It 
may  more  or  less  constantly  neglect  or  refuse  on  practical 
grounds,  to  deal  with  certain  attributes ;  but  that  is  a  very 
different  matter  from  a  formal  declaration  such  as  in 
present-day  zoologists  make,  that  with  these  attribute j 
zoology  has  nothing  to  do.  Such  a  declaration  is  self-stu  I 
ing,  if  not  self-stultifying,  in  that  it  is  a  virtual  self-inhi- 
bition by  zoology  of  its  own  growth. 

These  reflections  may  be  terminated  by  defining  the  mo- 
tives and  the  mental  attitude  with  which  I  approach  the 
great  problem  of  consciousness.  I  come  to  it  not  as  a  meta- 
physician, not  as  a  psychologist,  not  as  a  physiologist,  not 
even  as  an  anthropologist,  but  as  an  anthropological  zoolo- 
gist ;  as  a  zoologist  who  in  course  of  his  regular  professional 
work  takes  up  the  animal  group  of  which  he  himself  is  a  mem- 
ber, chancing  as  he  does  to  possess  among  other  attributes 
that  of  knowing  his  own  life  directly,  that  is,  through  sub- 
jective or  self-conscious  experience,  as  well  as  indirectly 
through  objective  experience. 

Approaching  the  problem  of  consciousness  in  such  an  at- 
titude and  for  such  a  motive,  it  is  impossible  to  view  it  other- 
wise than  as  one  aspect  of  the  larger  problem  of  life  gener- 
ally.^ For  while  the  psychologically  and  metaphysically  im- 
portant question  of  whether  consciousness  is  coextensive 
with  life  need  not  be  raised  by  the  naturalist,  the  indubitable 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  29 

fact  that  at  least  a  large  sector  of  life  is  conscious;  in  other 
words,  the  fact  that  consciousness  is  a  part  of  life,  he  can 
'lot  ignore  if  he  is  to  deal  with  consciousness  at  all.  For  the 
naturalist,  then,  no  hypothesis  or  theory  of  consciousness 
can  be  satisfactory  which  is  not  clearly  and  expressly  em- 
bedded in  and  an  essential  part  of  an  hypothesis  or  theory 
of  life  generally.  Our  central  hypothesis,  drafted  in  ac- 
cordance with  these  principles,  may  now  be  given. 

Formulation  of  the  Central  Hypothesis 

All  the  manifestations  which  in  the  aggregate  we  call 
T  We,  from  those  presented  by  the  simplest  plants  to  those 
consciously  psychical  nature  presented  by  man  and 
numerous  other  animals,  result  from  the  chemical  reaction 
between  the  organism  and  the  respiratory  gases  they  take, 
oxygen  being  almost  certainly  the  effective  gas  for  nearly 
all  animals.  An  essential  implication  of  this  proposition 
is  that  every  living  individual  organism  has  the  value, 
chemically  speaking,  of  an  elementary  chemical  substance. 

Let  us  be  promptly  explicit  in  recognizing  the  character 
of  the  two  propositions  contained  in  this  hypothesis.  They 
are  manifestly  chemical  in  large  part,  and  a  complete  demon- 
stration of  their  truth  is  impossible  without  the  aid  of  chem- 
ical research  focus sed  directly  upon  them.  But  though 
clearly  chemical,  equally  clearly  they  go  beyond — far  beyond 
— present  chemical  knowledge.  To  speak  of  a  whole  organ- 
ism as  equivalent  to  a  chemical  element  seems  at  first  sight 
not  only  unwarranted  by  positive  chemical  knowledge,  but 
opposed  by  such  knowledge.  Furthermore,  the  term  "re- 
action" as  used  in  the  first  proposition  undoubtedly  seems 
quite  foreign  to  the  technical  meaning  which  chemistry  has 
attached  to  the  word.  Indeed  so  remote  to  say  the  least, 
are  these  fundamental  propositions  of  the  hypothesis  from 
definite  chemical  knowledge,  that  if  they  are  entitled  to  rank 


30  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

as  constituting  a  legitimate  scientific  hypothesis,  this  must 
be  on  grounds  other  than  those  of  present-day  technical 
chemistry  quite  as  much  as  on  those  of  such  chemistry.  In 
attempting,  consequently,  to  establish  the  propositions  on  a 
true  and  useful  hypothetical  basis,  it  will  be  permissible  to 
notice  these  other  grounds  first. 

Preliminary  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis  as  Such 

The  proposition  that  each  living  individual  has  the  chem- 
ical value  of  an  elementary  substance,  will  receive  attention 
first,  and  the  initial  step  will  be  to  inquire  what,  in  general, 
the  criterion  is  of  an  elementary  chemical  substance.  Here, 
for  instance,  is  a  lump  of  phosphorus.  In  virtue  of  what  is 
it  declared  to  be  such  a  substance?  Not  primarily,  let  us 
specially  notice,  because  the  phosphorus  is  simple,  that  is 
to  say,  is  an  element  in  the  sense  of  not  being  reducible  to 
still  simpler  substances.  Rather  the  basal  criterion  of  its 
being  a  chemical  substance  is  that  upon  its  being  brought 
into  contact  under  certain  conditions  with  certain  other 
chemical  substances,  oxygen  for  instance,  there  is  produced 
a  third  substance  having  very  different  attributes  from  either 
of  the  original  substances.  Transformation  of  substances 
chiefly  through  interaction  upon  one  another  is  the  founda- 
tion fact  which  has  brought  it  to  pass  that  substances  are 
described  as  chemical.  That  is  the  fact  upon  which  the 
science  of  chemistry  primarily  rests.  Facts  and  problems 
of  simplicity  and  complexity,  relative  and  absolute,  are 
later  and  secondary.  The  task  of  chemistry  "consists  in  the 
investigation  of  substances  and  those  of  their  processes  by 
which  the  physical  attributes  of  the  substances  undergo 
permanent  changes."  (Handworterbuch  der  Naturwissen- 
schaft.) 

Every  adequate  definition  of  chemistry  and  chemical  sub- 
stance and  chemical  action  contains  the  idea  of  transforma- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  81 

tion  in  one  form  or  another.  Clearness  on  this  point  is  in- 
dispensable to  our  purpose.  Chemistry  is  too  often  defined, 
even  in  elementary  text  books  and  in  dictionaries,  as  though* 
the  "composition  of  matter"  were  its  initial  and  most  es- 
sential function.  But  this  conception  is  surely  contrary  to 
the  history  and  most  essential  nature  of  the  science.  There 
is,  it  seems,  entire  agreement  among  competent  writers  that 
scientific  chemistry  is  a  direct  descendant  of  Alchemy,  and 
a  very  imperfect  knowledge  of  the  history  of  Alchemy  re- 
veals the  fact  that  the  every-where  present,  normal  trans- 
formations in  nature,  particularly  in  inorganic  nature,  were 
the  foundation  phenomena  of  this  old  art.  One  has  only  to 
recall  the  place  held  by  the  idea  of  the  transmutation  of 
metals,  this  idea  having  usually  the  practical  aim  of  chang- 
ing the  "base  metals"  into  "noble  metals."  The  "phil- 
osopher's stone"  and  the  "great  elixir"  were  magical  some- 
things by  which  the  transmutations  could  be  accomplished. 

Greatly  significant  from  our  standpoint  is  the  fact  that 
one  of  the  objectives  of  Robert  Boyle  (middle  of  the  seven- 
teenth century),  who,  perhaps  as  much  as  any  one  man,  is 
entitled  to  be  called  the  father  of  experimental  chemistry, 
was  to  rectify  the  false  and  mystical  notions  prevalent  in  his 
time  about  "Elements,"  "Principles,"  "Essences,"  etc.  "Tell 
me  what  you  mean  by  your  Principles  and  your  Elements," 
Boyle  demanded,  "then  I  can  discuss  them  with  you  as  work- 
ing instruments  for  advancing  knowledge." 

What  is  "behind"  the  transformations — forces,  elements, 
principles,  essences,  spirits  or  what  not — is  indeed  an  impor- 
tant and,  properly  asked,  a  legitimate  question.  But — and 
here  is  the  most  vital  fact  of  all — it  is  a  question  which  can 
not  be  raised  even,  until  after  the  transformations  have  been 
observed,  nor  can  an  answer  of  objective  value  be  given  un- 
less the  whole  round  of  observed  phenomena,  the  substances 
previous  to  transformation,  the  transformatory  processes, 
and  the  new  substances,  be  accepted  at  their  face  value,  that 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

is  to  sa}',  at  a  value  which  is  as  near  to  ultimate  truth  as  any 
truth  whatever,  connected  with  the  phenomena. 

The  elemental  constitution  of  bodies  is  an  inference,  al- 
ways and  solely,  drawn  from  their  observed  corporeal  attri- 
butes. And  chemistry  is  the  science  which  assumes  the  task 
of  drawing,  elaborating,  and  systematizing  these  inferences 
on  the  basis  of  the  transformation  of  the  attributes.  The 
meaning  of  the  statement  that  chemistry  is  one  of  the  natural 
sciences  is  that  chemistry  is  the  science  which  uses  its  natural 
history  observations  to  penetrate  still  more  deeply  into  the 
constitution  of  bodies.  Natura  a  natura  vincitur,  nature  is 
surrounded  by,  is  contained  in  nature,  is  as  fundamental  a 
truth  for  chemistry  as  for  any  other  natural  science.  A 
living  being  is  as  much  a  natural  body  as  is  a  piece  of  phos- 
phorus, and  its  obvious  attributes,  its  outer-layer  attributes, 
are  as  essential  to  its  nature  as  are  its  inner,  its  hidden 
attributes.  So  any  genuinely  transformatory  changes,  and 
genuinely  new  products  arising  through  the  reaction  between 
the  living  body  and  some  other  body  is  so  far  chemical  in 
nature,  and  the  reacting  bodies  are  so  far  chemical. 

A  long  step  toward  justifying  the  proposition  that  each 
individual  living  organism  has  the  value,  chemically,  of  an 
elementary  substance,  will  be  taken  if  it  can  be  shown  that 
any  qualitatively  new  product  whatever  results  from  the 
interaction  between  the  organism  acting  as  a  unit,  as  one, 
as  an  element,  and  some  other  element.  Having  regard  to 
the  entire  world  of  living  beings,  the  chances  for  finding  new 
products  which  may  have  arisen  in  this  manner  are  prac- 
tically if  not  theoretically  infinite.  Manifestly,  then,  only  a 
very  small  sector  of  the  entire  range  of  such  possible  produc- 
tions can  be  searched.  It  must,  consequently,  be  our  aim,  as 
always  in  handling  inductive  natural  history  evidence,  to 
choose  for  examination  evidence  which  shall  be  most  clear- 
cut,  most  illustrative,  and  most  convincing. 

The  sector  of  organic  phenomena  best  capable  of  yielding 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  33 

such  evidence  is,  I  believe,  exactly  this  of  psychic  life.  And 
within  the  great  range  of  this  life,  the  higher  conscious  life 
of  man  is  most  replete  with  the  evidence  we  seek.  Again 
within  the  range  of  man's  higher  life,  each  individual's  own 
private  life,  even  his  subjective  life,  his  consciousness,  is  the 
evidence  most  certain  and  convincing.  Translating  this  last 
statement  into  familiar  language,  one  sees  that  it  is  only 
another  way — the  scientific  way — of  affirming  the  truth,  that 
the  greatest  of  all  certainties  of  which  man  is  capable  is  that 
of  his  own  existence.  I  am  saying,  virtually,  that  when  we 
analyze,  after  the  manner  of  objective  science,  this  old  fa- 
miliar affirmation  about  certainty,  and  carry  the  analysis 
as  far  as  we  are  at  present  able  to,  we  find  that  the  sense,  or 
better,  the  feeling  of  certainty  of  self-existence  and  self- 
identity  is  in  last  analysis  one  of  the  effects  of  a  transforma- 
tory  interaction  between  ourselves  and  some  substance  (oxy- 
gen?) in  our  breath,  as  stated  in  the  first  of  our  two  propo- 
sitions. 

That  proposition  seems  then  to  be  hardly  more  than  a 
recognition  that  psychic  phenomena  containing  at  least  the 
germ  of  consciousness  is  a  kind  of  chemical  product  which 
has  not  heretofore  been  clearly  recognized  as  such,  the  lack 
of  recognition  being  due  to  the  strangeness  of  the  product  as 
compared  with  any  chemical  products  with  which  experimen- 
tal chemistry  has  hitherto  occupied  itself.  But  looked  at  in 
a  really  broad  and  deep  way,  is  it  any  more  difficult  for  me 
to  interpret  a  state  of  consciousness  in  myself  to  be  a  result 
of  chemical  action  between  me  and  the  air  (oxygen?)  I 
breathe,  than  for  me  to  interpret  the  dim  greenish-white 
luminosity  of  a  piece  of  phosphorus  to  be  a  result  of  the 
chemical  action  between  the  phosphorus  and  the  air  essential 
to  the  glowing?  From  a  purely  chemical  standpoint  I  do 
not  believe  we  have  any  ground  for  holding  that  some  prod- 
ucts of  chemical  reaction  are  more  comprehensible  or  less 
comprehensible  than  are  others. 


34  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

Chemically  viewed  the  problem  now  on  our  hands  is  en- 
tirely one  of  -fact — fact  as  determined  by  observation  alone, 
and  by  observation  with  the  aid  of  experimentation.  If  it 
can  be  shown  that  each  individual  conscious  being  really  does 
behave  like  a  chemical  substance  in  the  process  of  reacting; 
and  if  the  result  of  such  reaction  can  be  shown  to  have  even 
one  of  the  essential  marks  of  a  chemical  product,  both  propo- 
sitions of  my  two-parted  hypothesis  are  warrantable  and  the 
hypothesis  becomes  genuinely  scientific — a  genuine  "working 
hypothesis" — one,  that  is,  for  bio-chemistry  to  take  seri- 
ously. 

More  Systematic  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis 

That  the  propositions  are  demonstrable  to  the  extent  of 
the  demand  just  indicated  is  my  contention.  This  conten- 
tion I  will  now  try  to  make  good  and  will  begin  with  a  few 
remarks  on  a  question  concerning  the  hypothesis  which 
ought  to  arise  instinctively  in  the  mind  of  every  one.  That 
question  is :  Does  such  a  conception  of  psychic  life  and  con- 
sciousness as  that  contained  in  our  hypothesis  imply  any  real 
infringement  upon  or  derogation  from  me,  in  the  deepest 
sense  a  real  entity  properly  designated  by  the  terms  person 
and  personality? 

On  saying  that  this  query  ought  to  arise  mstwctively,  I 
do  not  mean  ought  in  the  ethical  sense,  but  in  the  organismal 
sense.  That  is,  in  a  sense  which  implies  that  the  very  nature 
of  the  conscious  organism  is  that  it  is  not  only  self-existent 
in  a  measure  like  every  natural  object,  but  that  it  is  self-iden- 
tifiable, and  within  certain  bounds,  self-determinative  of  its 
own  acts.  Now  recognizing  it  to  be  thus  by  its  "very  na- 
ture" is  only  another  way  of  recognizing  that  it  is  so  in  its 
instincts  as  well  as  in  its  physical  organization.  But  since 
instinct  is  more  fundamental,  more  deep-rooted  in  the  or- 
ganism than  is  intellect,  as  phylogenic  and  ontogenic  psy- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  35 

chology  make  clear,  if  a  pronouncement  implying  a  de- 
rogation from  the  reality  and  natural  prerogatives  of  the 
individual  be  issued  from  the  intellect,  a  response  of  protest 
and  antagonism  would  be  expected  from  instinct.  This  would 
be  expected  as  an  ordinary  organic  impulse  to  self-defense 
and  self-preservation. 

The  Nature  of  "Outer"  or  Objective  and  "Inner"  or 
Subjective 

What  we  have  to  do  consequently  is  to  scrutinize  the  con- 
scious individual  in  order  to  see  if  it  presents  any  uniqueness 
of  attributes  and  of  transformatory  power  in  reacting  with 
other  bodies  that  is  on  a  par  with  the  uniqueness  of  an  ordi- 
nary chemical  substance  in  the  same  respects.  Now  it  is, 
as  suggested  some  pages  back,  exactly  in  the  conscious,  the 
subjective  life,  that  such  uniqueness  is  most  easily  demon- 
strable. There  are  several  ways  in  which  the  conscious  indi- 
vidual manifests  this  uniqueness.  A  particularly  convincing 
way,  I  think,  is  in  the  relation  between  what  are  commonly 
known  as  the  objective,  or  "outer,"  and  the  subjective  or 
"inner"  sides  of  mental  life.  This,  consequently,  will  be  the 
approach  to  the  subject  chosen  by  us  and  we  will  enter  upon 
it  by  returning  to  Royce,  first  to  his  "Outlines  of  Psychol- 
ogy," then  a  little  later  to  some  of  his  specifically  philosophi- 
cal writings. 

In  the  first  chapter  of  the  Outlines,  devoted  to  initial  defi- 
nitions and  explanations,  Royce  states,  simply  and  clearly, 
a  distinction  "between  our  physical  and  mental  life,"  which 
elsewhere  he  has  worked  out  with  great  elaboration.  Thus : 
"Physical  facts  are  usually  conceived  as  'public  property,' 
patent  to  all  properly  equipped  observers.  All  such  observ- 
ers, according  to  our  customary  view,  see  the  same  physical 
facts.  But  psychical  facts  are  essentially  'private  property,' 
existent  for  one  alone.  This  constitutes  the  very  conception 


36  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

of  the  difference  between  'inner'  psychical  or  mental,  and 
physical  or  'outer'  facts."  3 

Ever-present,  and  obvious  as  is  the  comparison  here  made, 
it  nevertheless  is  of  so  great  importance  that  we  must  stop 
and  reflect  upon  it,  for  we  shall  surely  fail  to  grasp  the  full 
measure  of  what  is  to  follow  if  we  are  lukewarm  toward  one 
of  the  elements  of  it.  The  element  I  refer  to  is  the  unique- 
ness, the  essentially  personal  character  of  inner  as  contrast- 
ed with  outer  facts.  Every  normal  person  is  ready  enough 
to  insist  that  his  thoughts,  his  feelings,  his  emotions  and  all 
the  rest  of  his  higher  psychical  experiences  are  his  and  his 
alone.  The  tremendous  reality  and  force  of  the  rights  of 
"private  opinion,"  of  "personal  conscience"  and  so  forth, 
among  civilized  men,  hardly  need  to  be  expatiated  on. 

The  character  of  the  uniqueness  of  these  experiences,  how- 
ever, concerns  practical  living  less  vitally,  so  we  give  it  less 
attention.  The  whole  vast  range  of  my  mental  life,  from 
the  lowest,  simplest,  vaguest  sensations  to  the  highest,  most 
bewildering  complex  emotions,  passions,  imaginings  and 
thoughts,  are  my  own,  absolutely,  so  far  as  other  persons 
are  concerned.  I  cannot  share  them  to  the  least  extent  with 
another  person.  Of  course  I  can  let  others,  especially  my 
most  intimate  associates,  my  dearest  friends,  know  a  good 
deal  about  these  experiences  of  mine.  But  after  all,  gladly 
as  I  would  share  many  of  them  with  these  friends,  it  is  utter- 
ly impossible  for  me  to  do  so.  My  experiences  must  remain 
wholly  outside  of  their  consciousness.  No  two  persons  can 
have  the  same  experience  any  more  than  they  can  have  the 
same  hands  or  stomachs.  Nor  is  this  all.  If  mental  life  is 
subject  to  the  general  biological  laws  of  variation  into  which 
we  have  latterly  gained  much  insight,  I  am  obliged  to  sup- 
pose that  these  experiences  of  mine,  the  whole  retinue  of  sen- 
sations, feelings,  emotions  and  thoughts,  differ  somewhat 
from  the  corresponding  experiences  of  other  persons.  And 
all  observation  confirms  this  supposition — much  of  it  strong- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  57 

ly.  Inferential  evidence  could  hardly  be  stronger  than  that 
my  particular  emotional  response  to  opera  singing,  for 
example,  is  quite  different  from  that  of  many  other  persons. 
Obviously  we  are  here  skirting  the  edge  of  what  modern 
realism  in  formal  philosophy  calls  pluralism,  and  deals  with 
in  part  as  the  question  of  whether  percepts  are  strictly  indi- 
vidual and  personal.  No  philosopher  with  whose  views  I 
have  become  acquainted,  has  discussed  this  question  so  fully, 
and  in  my  opinion,  so  illuminatingly  as  Sellars.  The  follow- 
ing sentences  taken  from  his  chapter,  The  Advance  of  the 
Personal,  show  clearly,  it  seems  to  me,  that  the  conclusions 
he  has  reached,  working  from  the  purely  philosophical  side, 
are  essentially  the  same  as  those  arrived  at  by  me,  advancing 
from  the  biological  side :  "What  may  be  called  the  sensory 
content  of  our  percepts  is  important, — I  do  not  wish  to 
be  understood  to  belittle  it, — but  so  are  the  meanings  which 
arise  in  connection  with  our  bodily  activities  and  motor  ad- 
justments to  stimuli.  Here  again,  we  are  face  to  face  with 
individual  factors  in  perception  which  even  the  idealist  must 
recognise  and  somehow  explain.  Evidently,  perception  is  not 
a  mere  passive  presentation,  but  a  construction  whose  gene- 
tic elements  can  be  partially  traced.  Finally,  let  us  call  to 
mind  that  percepts  are  continuous  with  feelings  and  with  the 
so-called  organic  sensations.  .  .  .  Once  vaguely  objective, 
feeling  is  now  considered  subjective  or  personal."  Many 
other  sentences  and  paragraphs  of  like  purport  could  be 
quoted  from  this  author.  I  have  selected  this  for  the  two- 
fold reason  that  it  indicates  the  measure  of  my  agreement 
with  his  view  as  to  the  personal  character  of  percepts  and 
the  rest  of  conscious  life;  and  at  the  same  time  indicates 
wherein  I  shall  have  to  out-do  him  in  the  matter  of  validat- 
ing the  individual.  A  part  of  our  task,  to  be  reached  a  little 
later,  will  be  to  show  that  although  feeling  and  all  the  rest 
of  psychic  life  is  indeed  subjectively  personal,  it  is  also 
objectively  personal.  In  other  words,  it  will  be  my  task  to 


38  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 


remove,  or  at  least  to  show  the  way  to  remove,  the  vagueness 
which  Sellars  asserts,  rightly,  has  hitherto  clouded  this 
side  of  personality.  To  do  this  thing  is,  indeed,  one  of  my 
most  important  chances  to  contribute  to  a  "better  philosophy 
of  life." 

But  since  our  psychical  life,  especially  our  conscious  life, 
is  a  vast — incalculably  vast — complex  of  experiences,  of 
"contents,"  sounds,  sights,  memories,  feelings,  ideas,  many 
of  which  are  set  off  very  sharply  from  the  rest,  are  clearly 
characterizable,  and  are  wonderfully  persistent;  and  since 
innumerable  of  these  are  coming  along  all  the  while  which 
have  much  of  genuine  newness  about  them ;  and  since  further, 
these  contents  of  consciousness  are  intertwined  with  and  are 
determinative  of  a  vast  complex  of  other  contents  called  voli- 
tions which  in  turn  are  linked  up  with  and  are  more  or  less 
directive  of  bodily  activities  of  many  kinds,  some  purely  re- 
flex and  some  instinctive,  it  seems  impossible  to  escape  recog- 
nizing, even  if  one  wanted  to,  that  if  the  verb  "to  create"  has 
any  definite  meaning  at  all  the  normal,  self-conscious  animal 
organism  is  about  the  most  creative  thing  we  know  or  can 
conceive.  Indeed  it  is  altogether  likely  that  the  very  notion 
of  creation,  whether  natural  or  supernatural,  came  initially 
from  the  creative  activity  and  the  impulse  to  such  activity, 
of  man  himself. 

We  may  justly  say,  I  think,  that  we  know  all  creativeness, 
chemical  creativeness  with  the  rest,  through  being  in  our  own 
deepest  natures  creative,  that  is,  transformative  and  trans- 
formative in  the  way  which  we  call  chemical.  We  learn 
about  the  processes  of  life  and  call  some  of  the  most  essen- 
tial of  them  chemical  just  by  performing  those  processes  as 
some  of  our  most  essential  attributes.  A  portion  of  the  pro- 
cess which  goes  on  within  us,  together  with  the  corresponding 
product,  constitutes  what  we  call  the  science  of  bio-chemis- 
try. This  means  that  according  to  our  hypothesis  "objec- 
tive" and  "subjective,"  or  "outer"  and  "inner"  as  applied  to 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  39 

life,  are  something  quite  different  from  what  they  have  been 
either  in  traditional  philosophies,  or  in  most,  at  least,  of 
recent  psychology.  "When  we  speak,"  Royce  writes,  "of 
our  physiological  processes  as  internal,  the  word  'internal,' 
although  it  here  generally  implies  'hidden,  in  whole  or  in  part, 
from  actual  outer  observation',  does  not  imply  'directly  felt 
by  us  ourselves."  5  My  hypothesis  implies  a  denial  of  the 
correctness  of  this  statement.  I  say  that  in  the  sum  total 
of  the  "contents  of  consciousness,"  a  nether  segment,  as  one 
might  call  it,  of  physiological  processes  is  "directly  felt  by 
ourselves."  There  is  no  content  of  consciousness  which  does 
not  contain  an  element  that  is  internal  or  subjective  m  what- 
ever sense  any  other  content  of  consciousness  is  internal  or 
subjective.  And  per  contra,  there  is  no  content  of  conscious- 
nets  which  is  not  objective  to  some  extent,  m  whatever  sense 
any  other  content  of  consciousness  is  objective.  The  mind, 
according  to  this  conception,  is  not  something  which  uses 
the  brain  or  any  other  part  of  the  organism  merely  as  a  tool 
with  which  to  make  thoughts  and  other  contents  of  con- 
sciousness. Nor  on  the  other  hand  is  consciousness  of  the 
nature  of  a  secretion,  the  gland  for  which  is  the  brain,  though 
unquestionably  the  brain  has  an  essential  part  in  the  pro- 
duction of  thought  and  the  higher  contents  of  consciousness. 
Among  the  consequences  of  the  reaction  between  the  or- 
ganism and  the  air  we  breathe  are  consciousness  with  its 
marvellously  rich  and  varied  contents. 

But  at  this  point  I  must  specially  request  the  reader  to 
notice  that  I  am  not  pretending  to  describe  and  explain  all 
the  contents  of  consciousness.  In  other  words  it  is  not  a 
theory  of  knowledge,  but  a  theory  of  consciousness  that  I 
am  sketching;  and  knowledge  in  the  strict  sense,  and  con- 
sciousness are  very  different.  They  differ,  according  to  my 
understanding,  much  as  the  fully  developed,  physical  organ- 
ism differs  from  the  living  substance,  or  protoplasm,  of 
rhich  the  organism  is  composed.  Consequently  I  am  not 


40  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

even  concerned  primarily  with  sensation  in  so  far  as  this  im- 
plies sense  organs  or  even  nerves  and  nerve  terminals  of  the 
simplest  kind.  Rather  I  am  dealing  with  the  stages  and  con- 
ditions antecedent  to  consciousness  and  in  which  it  is  latent, 
in  much  such  way  as  the  cytologist  when  he  studies  the  living 
substance  of  all  sorts  of  tissue-cells  is  not  dealing  with  organs 
and  the  organism  in  the  full  sense,  but  only  with  their  sub- 
strata. But  although  it  is  not  knowledge,  properly  speaking, 
either  in  its  conceptual  or  perceptual  aspect  that  I  am  dis- 
cussing, since  my  enterprise  does  take  me  across  the  border 
line  and  a  short  distance  into  the  realm  of  knowledge,  I  must, 
in  the  interest  of  historical  continuity  and  setting,  say  a 
little  more  than  I  have  said  about  the  general  nature  of 
knowledge. 

My  assertion  should  be  taken  literally  that  there  is  no 
content  of  consciousness  which  is  purely  either  subjective  or 
objective,  inner  or  outer,  conceptive  or  perceptive,  ideational 
or  impressional,  or  whatever  form  of  expression  be  given  the 
antithesis  here  implied.  That  every  content  of  consciousness 
which  exists  or  can  be  conceived  has  an  essential  element  of 
both  members  of  the  antithesis  is  exactly  what  I  mean.  To 
illustrate,  even  the  axioms,  postulates,  or  whatever  else  may 
be  counted  as  most  ultimate  in  mathematics  contain  an  ele- 
ment of  the  outer,  or  objective,  as  well  as  of  the  inner,  or 
subjective.  These  mathematical  contents  of  consciousness  I 
single  out  to  illustrate  my  meaning  because  they  have  been 
clung  to  by  philosophers  and  scientists  more  tenaciously  than 
any  others  as  purely  subjective  or  mental.  And  further 
there  is  a  strategic  gain  in  this  reference  to  mathematics  in 
that  it  brings  into  the  open  the  fundamental  opposition  of 
my  hypothesis  to  one  main  root  of  Cartesian  philosophy; 
the  philosophy,  that  is,  from  which  the  modern  doctrine  of 
psycho-physical  parallelism  has  grown.  Our  thinking,  which 
Descartes  held  proves  our  existence,  really  proves  it  only  in 
so  far  as  it  shows  that  among  the  activities  essential  to  the 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  41 

human  organism  thinking  is  one.  In  other  words  the  "there- 
fore" in  "I  think,  therefore  I  am,"  is  true  only  because  "I 
am,  therefore  I  think,"  the  reverse  proposition,  is  also  true 
and  includes  the  other  truth.  The  lesser  truth  is  true  be- 
cause it  is  an  essential  part  of  the  larger  truth,  much  in 
the  same  way  that  the  cells  of  a  multicellular  organism  are 
alive  because  they  are  essential  parts  of  the  organism. 

We  need  not  inquire  how,  from  this  serious  shortcoming  of 
Descartes'  description  of  psychic  life  Descartes  went  on  to 
the  conclusion  that  "there  is  nothing  really  existing  apart 
from  our  thought"  and  that  "neither  extension,  nor  figure, 
nor  local  motion,  nor  anything  similar  that  can  be  attrib- 
uted to  body,  pertains  to  our  nature,  and  nothing  save 
thought  alone;  and,  consequently,  that  the  notion  we  have  of 
our  mind  precedes  that  of  any  corporeal  thing,  and  is  more 
certain,  seeing  we  still  doubt  whether  there  is  any  body  in 
existence,  while  we  readily  perceive  that  we  think."  6  Nor 
need  we  concern  ourselves  with  the  voluminous  and  tedious 
reasonings  by  which  a  considerable  number  of  moderns,  fol- 
lowing Descartes's  lead,  have  convinced  themselves  that  they 
have  "reduced"  all  reality  or  at  least  all  reality  that  really 
amounts  to  anything,  to  quantity.  Enough  now  to  remark 
that  every  modern  biologist  who  really  accepts  the  basal  data 
of  his  science,  must  agree  that  "Psycho-physical  paralellism 
.  .  .  stands  to-day  as  the  scandalous  but  irrefutable  conse- 
quence of  postulating  a  material  world  without  qualities  and 
a  world  of  minds  that  lack  spatiality  and  exists — nowhere"  7 
One  way  of  characterizing  my  hypothesis  would  be  to  say 
that  it  is  an  effort  to  remove  this  scandal  by  showing  where- 
in the  postulation  noted  by  Dr.  Montague  is  not  true. 

The  genetic  relationships  of  my  hypothesis  can  be  still 
farther  indicated  by  coming  on  down  from  Descartes  to 
Hume  then  from  Hume  to  Huxley  and  finally  to  G.  F.  Stout 
and  John  Dewey  as  philosophers  of  to-day.  Hume's  nom- 
enclature for  the  subjective  and  objective  sides  of  man's 


42  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

psychic  life  is  "Relations  of  Ideas"  for  the  first,  and  "Mat- 
ters of  Fact"  for  the  second.  Of  the  first  kind  says  Hume, 
"Are  the  sciences  of  Geometry,  Algebra  and  Arithmetic ;  and 
in  short,  every  affirmation  which  is  intuitively  or  demonstra- 
tively certain."  .  .  .  "That  three  times  -five  is  equal  to  half 
of  thirty/9  is  a  simple  illustration  of  the  relation  of 
ideas.  And,  "Propositions  of  this  kind  are  dis- 
coverable by  the  mere  operation  of  thought,  with- 
out dependence  on  what  is  anywhere  existent  in  the  uni- 
verse." And  further  on,  Part  2,  same  section,  we  read : 
"It  must  certainly  be  allowed,  that  nature  has  kept  us  at  a 
great  distance  from  all  her  secrets,  and  has  afforded  us  only 
the  knowledge  of  a  few  superficial  qualities  of  objects;  while 
she  conceals  from  us  those  powers  and  principles  on  which 
the  influence  of  those  objects  entirely  depends."  Then  Hume 
goes  into  a  discussion  of  the  operations  and  relations  of  the 
"superficial  qualities"  and  "secret"  powers  of  objects  which 
is  so  similar  to  my  treatment  of  the  relation  of  the  organism 
to  the  attributes  of  certain  objects  (chapters  20  and  21  this 
book,  and,  more  particularly,  my  essay  Is  Nature  Infinite?  9) 
that  it  seems  as  though  his  words  must  have  been  in  my  mind 
when  I  thought  out  what  I  have  there  written,  though  I  cer- 
tainly was  not  conscious  of  Hume's  views.  And  this  sub- 
conscious influence  appears  the  more  probable  in  that  I  have 
almost  conclusive  proof  of  having  read  his  argument  not  long 
before  my  own  was  written.  I  am  certain,  however,  that  if 
his  statements  were  in  my  mind  they  were  only  in  its  pro- 
conscious  part  and  were  not  nor  ever  had  been  in  its  full- 
conscious  part.  In  other  words,  if  I  had  read  his  words  I 
had  not  grasped  their  full  significance.  This  probable  in- 
stance of  the  "sub-"  or  "pro"-conscious  I  refer  to  not  so 
much  because  of  its  interest  in  this  instance,  as  because  of  its 
bearing  on  my  conception  of  the  nature  of  consciousness. 
The  discussion  by  Hume  to  which  I  refer  is  that  in  which  he 
talka  about  the  sensible  qualities  and  the  "secret  powers" 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  43 

of  the  bread  we  eat.  "Our  senses  inform  us  of  the  color, 
weight,  and  consistence  of  the  bread,"  he  says,  "but  neither 
sense  nor  reason  can  ever  inform  us  of  those  qualities  which 
fit  it  for  the  nourishment  and  support  of  a  human  body." 
The  particular  puzzle  upon  which  Hume  comes  in  this 
matter  is  the  fact  that  although  the  examination  here  and 
now  of  a  natural  object  gives  us  absolutely  no  clue  as  to  what 
latent  attributes  ("secret  powers,"  he  calls  them)  the  ob- 
ject may  possess,  when  we  examine  a  second  object  of  the 
same  kind  we  assume  that  the  same  secret  powers  are  pos- 
sessed by  the  second  object.  "If  a  body  of  like  colour  and 
consistence  with  that  bread,  which  we  have  formerly  eat, 
be  presented  to  us,  we  make  no  scruple  of  repeating  the  ex- 
periment, and  foresee,  with  certainty,  like  nourishment  and 
support.  Now  this  is  a  process  of  the  mind,  of  thought," 
Hume  goes  on  to  say,  "of  which  I  would  willingly  know  the 
foundation."  "The  bread,"  he  says,  a  little  farther  on, 
"which  formerly  I  eat,  nourished  me;  that  is,  a  body  of  such 
sensible  qualities  was,  at  that  time,  endued  with  such  secret 
powers :  but  does  it  follow  that  other  bread  must  also  nour- 
ish me  at  another  time,  and  that  like  sensible  qualities  must 
always  be  attended  with  like  secret  powers?  The  conse- 
quences seem  nowise  necessary.  At  least,  it  must  be  acknowl- 
edged that  there  is  here  a  consequence  drawn  by  the  mind; 
that  there  is  a  certain  step  taken;  a  process  of  thought, 
and  an  inference,  which  wants  to  be  explained."  Then  after 
a  little  further  argument  to  show  the  necessity  of  recog- 
nizing such  a  process  we  find  this  to  me  exceedingly  interest- 
ing passage:  "There  is  required  a  medium,  which  may  en- 
able the  mind  to  draw  such  an  inference,  if  indeed  it  be  drawn 
by  reasoning  and  argument.  What  that  medium  is,  I  must 
confess,  passes  my  comprehension;  and  it  is  incumbent  on 
those  to  produce  it,  who  assert  that  it  really  exists,  and  is 
the  origin  of  all  our  conclusions  concerning  matter  of  fact." 
The  great  merit  here  shown  by  Hume  is  his  ability  to  push 


44  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

the  analysis  of  his  problem  to  the  very  limit  of  the  positive 
information  he  had  to  go  on,  recognise  exactly  wherein  his 
information  was  lacking,  and  then  stop  without  running  off 
into  a  purely  speculative  substitute  for  his  deficient  knowl- 
edge. According  to  my  hypothesis  the  unknown  "medium" 
which  he  saw  must  exist,  the  researches  of  a  century  and  a 
half  since  he  wrote,  in  chemistry,  physiology,  general  zoology 
and  botany,  and  psychology,  have  enabled  us  to  see  is  the 
individual  animal  organism  reaching  with  the  respiratory 
substance  (oxygen?)  it  takes  in.  In  this  one  particular  and, 
from  the  standpoint  to  which  we  have  been  accustomed,  very 
peculiar  case,  the  reaction  is  at  one  and  the  same  time  part 
of  the  essence  of  both  ideas  and  impressions  in  the  Humean 
sense,  the  reaction  being  the  "medium"  or  the  "certain  step" 
by  which  the  inference  is  drawn,  this  inferring  being  possible 
because  of  the  continuity  of  the  organism  as  a  person,  or 
self,  and  the  persistence  of  the  respiratory  substance  as  the 
same  identical  thing  from  the  past  through  the  present  into 
the  future. 

We  will  now  notice  how  Huxley,  because  of  his  much  more 
extensive  knowledge  of  the  structure  and  function  of  animals 
than  Hume  possessed,  was  able  to  draw  still  closer  than  Hume 
could  to  the  heart  of  the  old  Mind-Body  puzzle.  The  gist 
of  Huxley's  position  on,  and  contribution  to,  the  problem 
can  conveniently  be  presented  through  his  remarks  on  the 
question  of  innateness  of  various  aspects  of  psychic  life, 
these  remarks  occurring  in  his  essay  on  Hume.  After  point- 
ing out  that  neither  Locke  nor  Hume  seemed  to  know  exact- 
ly what  Descartes,  the  originator  of  the  modern  conception 
of  innate  ideas,  meant  by  his  phrase  "idees  naturelles,"  Hux- 
ley quotes  Descartes  as  follows:  "I  have  used  this  term  in 
the  same  sense  as  when  we  say  that  generosity  is  innate  in 
certain  families;  or  that  certain  maladies  such  as  gout  or 
gravel,  are  innate  in  others ;  not  that  children  born  in  these 
families  are  troubled  with  such  diseases  in  their  mother's 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  45 

womb;  but  because  they  are  born  with  the  disposition  or 
faculty  of  contracting  them."  10  Then  after  further  quota- 
tions to  the  same  effect  Huxley  writes:  "Whoever  denies 
what  is,  in  fact,  an  inconceivable  proposition,  that  sensations 
pass,  as  such,  from  the  external  world  into  the  mind,  must 
admit  the  conclusion  here  laid  down  by  Descartes,  that, 
strictly  speaking,  sensations,  and  a  fortiori,  all  the  other 
contents  of  the  mind,  are  innate.  Or,  to  state  the  matter  in 
accordance  with  views  previously  expounded,  that  they  are 
products  of  the  inherent  properties  of  the  thinking  organ,  in 
which  they  lie  potentially,  before  they  are  called  into  exist- 
ence by  their  appropriate  causes." 

The  upshot  of  this  clearly  is  that  innate  for  Descartes  and 
Huxley  means  hardly  anything  else  than  hereditary,  as  ap- 
plied to  the  psychical  as  well  as  to  the  physical  attributes  of 
animals.  The  ample  justification  in  our  day  of  the  view 
that  psychical  attributes  are  hereditary  should,  it  would 
seem,  restore  to  full  standing  in  biology,  the  conception  of 
innate  ideas — only,  of  course,  in  a  very  different  sense  from 
that  into  which  later  Idealists  have  perverted  it. 

It  is  in  this  discussion  that  Huxley  makes  one  of  the  most 
direct  and  unanswerable  arguments  against  materialism  that 
can  be  made :  "The  more  completely  the  materialistic  posi- 
tion is  admitted,  the  easier  it  is  to  show  that  the  idealistic 
position  is  unassailable,  if  the  idealist  confines  himself  with- 
in the  limits  of  positive  knowledge."  11  That  is  to  say,  if  the 
materialist  insists  that  all  traces  of  innateness  of  ideas  and 
other  contents  of  the  mind  must  be  repudiated,  he  virtually 
contends  that  heredity  of  whatever  sort,  whether  of  physical 
or  psychical  attributes,  must  be  repudiated.  With  this  con- 
ception of  innateness  in  the  entire  psychic  aspect  of  the 
organism  before  him  Huxley  asks:  "What  is  meant  by  ex- 
perience?" 

"It  is  the  conversion,"  he  replies,  "by  unknown  causes,  of 
these  innate  potentialities  into  actual  experiences."  12  Now 


46  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

these  "unknown  causes"  are,  according-  to  my  view,  essential- 
ly the  same  as  the  "medium"  which  Hume  recognized  must 
exist  for  making  the  "step"  possible  from  the  "superficial 
qualities"  to  the  "secret  powers"  of  natural  objects  and  from 
the  "secret  powers"  of  one  object  to  those  of  another.  They 
are,  to  repeat,  the  reaction  of  the  organism  in  its  latently 
psychical  aspect,  with  "the  breath  of  life,"  that  is,  with  the 
oxygen,  or  whatever  be  the  gaseous  constituent  of  the  air 
which  is  active  in  respiration.  And  I  believe  we  can  see  to 
a  considerable  extent  why  Huxley  considered  these  causes  as 
wholly  unknown.  It  was  because  physiology  and  bio-chemis- 
try in  his  day  were  not  yet  able  to  view  the  organism  from 
the  standpoint  of  physical  chemistry.  Because  of  this  ina- 
bility Huxley  nor  any  other  physiologist  of  his  period  had 
an  adequate  structural  ground-work  for  thinking  organis- 
mally  about  living  things.  They  were  consequently  obliged, 
really,  to  think  of  all  psychic  phenomena,  and  consciousness 
with  the  rest,  as  being  restricted  to  the  nervous  system. 
That  such  was.  Huxley's  view  at  any  rate,  we  know  from 
his  own  words :  "No  one  who  is  cognisant  of  the  facts  of  the 
case  nowadays  doubts,"  he  writes,  "that  the  roots  of  psychol- 
ogy lie  in  the  physiology  of  the  nervous  system."  The  im- 
portant revision  of  this  statement  which  our  hypothesis  calls 
for  is  that  while  the  roots  of  psychology  are  indeed  in  the 
nervous  system  they  are  by  no  means  in  that  system  alone. 
They  pass  through  it  to  a  much  deeper  level,  so  to  speak,  and 
in  passing  draw  great  nutriment  from  it. 

In  a  brief  but  important  paper  starting  off  with  the  prop- 
osition that  a  philosopher  can  not  legitimately  question  the 
existence  of  the  external  world — that  all  he  can  rightly  do  is 
to  inquire  what  that  world  is  and  how  we  can  know  it  at  all, 
G.  F.  Stout  comes  to  the  kernel  of  the  problem  in  considera- 
bly the  same  way  that  Hume  and  Huxley  came  to  it.  "For 
primitive  consciousness  and  for  our  own  unreflective  con- 
sciousness," he  says,  "sense  experience  and  the  correlative 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  47 

agency  which  conditions  it  coalesce  in  one  unanalysed  total 
object.  They  coalesce  in  such  a  way  that  the  sense-presenta- 
tion appears  as  possessing  the  independence  of  the  not-self, 
and  the  independent  not-self  seems  to  be  given  with  the  same 
immediacy  as  the  sense-presentation."  And,  "this  complex 
but  unanalysed  cognition,"  Stout  continues,  "is  the  germ 
from  which  our  detailed  knowledge  of  matter  develops."  13 
If  proved  true  my  hypothesis  would  be  a  considerable  for- 
ward step,  I  believe,  in  analysing  this  "unanalysed  cogni- 
tion." For  although  Stout's  assertion  "the  independent  not- 
self  is  not  matter"  seems  at  first  sight  to  exclude  oxygen  or 
any  other  constituent  of  our  breath  from  such  a  place  in 
the  external  world  of  his  conception  as  that  which  it  has  in 
that  world  according  to  my  conception  this  exclusion  is,  I 
think,  only  seemingly  so,  for  a  sentence  farther  on  the  author 
says  matter  "essentially  includes  the  qualification  of  the  in- 
dependent not-self  by  the  content  of  sense-experience."  The 
seeming  discrepancy  is  probably  due  to  the  generality  of  the 
term  matter.  I  too  would  say  that  the  "independent  not- 
self"  is  not  matter  were  I  to  mean  by  matter  the  total  sub- 
stance of  the  external  world.  But  in  the  sense  that  the  effec- 
tive respiratory  gas  (oxygen  supposedly)  is  matter,  my 
hypothesis  would  require  me  to  hold  that  the  not-self  has  an 
essential  material  component,  which  component  is  really  the 
attribute  of  the  gas  in  virtue  of  which  it  reacts  with  the 
organism  in  the  peculiar  way  it  does  to  produce  conscious- 
ness. It  seems  to  me  that  what  Stout  seeks  in/the  "quali- 
fication of  the  independent  not-self  by  the  content  of  sense- 
experience"  is  the  immediately  consciousness-producing  attri- 
bute of  the  respiratory  gas.  We  might  state  the  point  this 
way:  Oxygen  (or  the  effective  respiratory  gas)  has  a  double 
status  in  human  consciousness.  First  and  most  fundamental- 
ly, it  has  the  status  of  an  immediate  and  essential  participant 
in  producing  all  consciousness  whatever;  and  second  it  has 
the  status  of  an  indirect  participant  in  producing  the  par- 


48  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

ticular  consciousness  which  we  call  observational  knowledge 
of  the  gas.  Our  knowledge  of  this  one  gas  is  due  to  two 
things,  (1)  to  our  reaction  to  it  through  our  sense  organs 
in  the  usual  psychological  meaning  of  react;  and  (£)  to  our 
reaction  with  it  through  the  protoplasmic  basis  of  all  con- 
sciousness, reaction  in  this  case  having  the  meaning  which 
chemistry  has  given  the  word.  What  the  relation  is  be- 
tween the  attributes  of  the  gas  in  virtue  of  which  it  reacts 
with  the  organism  in  these  two  ways,  and  also  what  the  rela- 
tion is  between  the  attributes  of  the  organism  in  virtue  of 
which  it  reacts  with  the  gas  in  these  two  ways,  are  questions 
with  which  a  theory  of  knowledge  would  deal  but  which  lies 
outside  of  the  scope  of  this  sketch,  which,  as  has  already 
been  said,  restricts  itself  to  a  theory  of  consciousness.  I 
may,  however,  refer  in  passing  to  the  fact  that  chemistry 
appears  to  be  all  at  sea  on  the  problem  of  the  relation  be- 
tween the  chemical  and  the  physical  attributes  of  all  sub- 
stances whatever ;  so  the  difficulties  about  oxygen  in  this  one 
particular  are  not  an  unshared  difficulty. 

Finally,  to  bring  this  exposition  of  the  historical  setting 
of  my  hypothesis  down  to  the  present  hour,  I  call  attention 
to  the  way  the  hypothesis  connects  with  the  best  that  formal 
philosophy  in  our  own  day  has  done,  or  as  I  suspect  is 
competent  to  do,  towards  making  out  what  "experience"  is. 
No  philosopher  with  whom  I  have  met  has  gone  farther  in 
this  direction  than  John  Dewey.  In  his  recent  essay,  A  Re- 
covery of  Philosophy,  we  read:  "Dialectic  developments  of 
the  notion  of  self-preservation,  of  the  conatus  essendi,  often 
ignore  all  the  important  facts  of  the  actual  process.  They 
argue  as  if  self-control,  self-development,  went  on  directly  as 
a  sort  of  unrolling  push  from  within.  But  life  endures  only 
in  virtue  of  the  support  of  the  environment."  The  italics 
are  mine  and  mark  the  most  vital  part  of  the  quotation  for 
us.  And  a  page  farther  on:  "Experience  is  no  slipping 
along  in  a  path  fixed  by  inner  consciousness.  Private  con- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  49 

sciousness  is  an  incidental  outcome  of  experience  of  a  vitally 
objective  sort;  it  is  not  its  source.  Undergoing,  however, 
is  never  mere  passivity.  The  most  patient  patient  is  more 
than  a  receptor.  He  is  also  an  agent — a  reactor."  .  .  . 
Again  the  italics  are  mine.  I  take  the  liberty  to  end  the  quo- 
tation at  "reactor"  though  the  remaining  part  of  the  sen- 
tence is  important  for  Dewey's  particular  purpose.  But  my 
aim  is  different.  I  want  to  fix  attention  on  the  two  state- 
ments italicised  for  the  purpose  of  showing  how  my  hypo- 
thesis connects  with  Dewey's  general  conception  of  experi- 
ence. When  Dewey  says  life  endures  only  as  supported  by 
the  environment,  he  is  speaking  in  very  general  terms,  having 
reference,  I  imagine,  more  to  social  and  other  bulk  aspects 
of  environment.  My  hypothesis,  on  the  contrary,  makes  the 
dependence  of  life  on  environment  exceedingly  specific  in  that 
it  undertakes  to  show  the  particular  thing  in  the  environ- 
ment, namely,  the  respiratory  part  of  the  atmosphere,  which 
is  physiologically  basal  to  self-development  and  self-pre- 
servation. The  Self  which  traditional  philosophy  has  strug- 
gled so  hard  to  understand  is  literally,  the  human  organism, 
according  to  my  hypothesis.  And  when  in  this  discussion  I 
speak  of  it  as  reacting  with  the  respiratory  air  to  produce 
consciousness,  I  am  using  the  verb  to  react  in  a  very  specific, 
physico-chemico-biological  sense,  while  Dewey  is  using  it  in 
a  general  sense,  and  explicitly  at  least,  with  only  a  psy- 
chological implication. 

The  "self"  which  I  am  suggesting  does  indeed  imply 
"another"  no  less  unequivocally  than  does  the  "self"  of  ad- 
vanced social  psychology.  But  the  "self"  and  the  "other" 
implied  by  my  hypothesis  differ  from  those  of  current  philo- 
sophical theory  in  that  the  roots  of  both  are  not  only  in 
the  social  relationships  of  the  human  species,  but  extend 
right  on  through  these  into  sub-human  relationships,  even 
down  into  the  very  constitution  of  inorganic  nature.  The 
"self"  and  the  "other"  of  my  conception  are  more  personally 


50  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

objective,  and  more  cosmic  in  their  affinities,  than  are  the 
"self"  and  the  "other"  of  social  psychology. 

Continuing  now  with  our  examination  of  the  foundation 
of  my  hypothesis  I  find  it  convenient,  especially  because  of 
my  reference  a  few  pages  back,  to  Huxley's  unanswerable 
contention  for  an  essence  of  truth  in  both  materialism  and 
idealism,  to  call  attention  to  a  natural  history  fact  in  the 
higher  mental  life  of  man  which  I  take  to  be  a  strong  con- 
firmation of  the  contention.     This  fact  concerns  the  general 
difference  between  what  are  commonly  known  as  the  mate- 
rialistic and  the  idealistic  attitudes  of  mind.     This  difference 
comes,  I  believe,  to  the  same  thing  finally,  as  the  difference 
between  the  objective  and  subjective  attitudes,  and  is  also 
the  difference,  at  bottom,  between  what  in  rather  loose  though 
prevalent   expression,   is    called   the   difference   between   the 
scientific  and  the  philosophic  attitudes.     It  would  seem  that 
the  philosopher  who  declares  himself  to  be  an  Absolute  Ideal- 
ist, as  Royce  does,  is  under  heavy  obligation,  especially  if 
he  enters  the  field  of  psychology,  to  explain  the  fact  that  the 
originators  of  great  interpretative  ideas  of  nature  have  in- 
variably recognized  that  their  hypotheses  must  be  "proved" ; 
that  is,  that  the  subjective  experience  which  constitutes  the 
hypothesis  must  be  found  to  have  its  counterpart  in  the  ex- 
ternal world  of  sense.     If  "Reason  creates  the  world,"  even 
in  the  recondite  meaning  of  Royce's  philosophy,  how  hap- 
pened it  that  Newton  should  have  been  so  "restless"  for  evi- 
dence of  an  objective,  an  external  counterpart  to  the  subjec- 
tive result  he  had  reached  by  mathematical  reasoning,  that 
he  held  back  his  reasoned  creation  for  sixteen  years,  waiting 
for  the  proof,  the  sense-perceptual  or  at  least  the   sense- 
percept  Wtf  experience,  that  should  round  out  his  reasoned 
truth?     May  not,  I  ask,  the  very  kernel  of  the  difference 
between  science  at  its  best  and  philosophy  at  its  best  be  in 
this,  that  the  typical  scientist  is  somewhat  deficient  in  "rest- 
lessness," adopting  Royce's  terminology,  for  internal  or  sub- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  51 

jective  reality;  while  the  philosopher  of  the  schools  is  some- 
what deficient  in  restlessness  for  external  or  objective  reality? 
We  could  say  with  almost  literal  chemical  accuracy  that  the 
curiosity  and  eagerness  of  the  naturalist  for  yet  unobserved 
objective  truth  is  due  to  an  unsatisfied  affinity  which  is  weak, 
or  in  some  instances,  wholly  lacking,  in  the  subjective  idealist. 
The  facts  which  seem  to  justify  our  chemico-organismal 
hypothesis  of  conscious  psychic  life,  seem  also  to  imply  a 
complete  interpenetration  of  objective  science  and  idealistic 
philosophy. 

As  to  the  Lowest  Terms  of  Self -Consciousness 

Let  us  now  veer  our  course  in  examining  self-conscious  life, 
and  see  what  can  be  made  out  about  its  roots  and  rootlets 
instead  of  about  its  fruitage. 

We  are  often  reminded  that  our  knowledge  about  our  in- 
ternal organs,  our  heart,  liver,  lungs,  et  cetera,  comes  only 
through  observations  by  the  anatomist  and  physiologist; 
that  we  are  quite  unconscious  of  these  organs  in  our  own 
bodies,  especially  if  they  are  working  normally.  Now  I 
point  out  that  to  be  perceptually  conscious  of  a  liver,  let  us 
say,  as  a  specialized  morphological  entity  performing  its 
appropriate  functions,  is  a  very  different  matter  from  being 
conscious  of  those  primal,  undifferentiated  processes  which 
are  basal  to  life  itself,  and  so  are  common  to  all  the  tissues 
whether  liver,  muscle,  brain,  or  what  not,  so  long  as  they  are 
actually  living.  That  that  which  is  truly  organic,  in  the 
sense  of  pertaining  to  the  fully  constituted  organism,  must 
be  regarded  from  this  standpoint  as  well  as  from  the  stand- 
point of  their  final  state  of  differentiation,  is  one  of  the 
common-places  of  modern  biology.  Let  a  person  in  as  near- 
ly perfect  health  as  he  ever  experiences,  do  his  best  to  elimi- 
nate all  external  and  internal  stimuli  of  his  specialized 
sensory  parts ;  also  all  remembering,  all  feeling  of  the  usual 


52  An  Organismal  Tlieory  of  Consciousness 

kind,  all  imagining,  and  all  thinking.  Then  let  him  answer 
the  question:  How  do  I  know  I  am  alive?  An  undertaking 
of  this  sort  is  wholly  introspective  in  the  sense  of  being 
such  that  each  person  must  engage  in  it  for  himself  alone. 
He  can  not  show  his  results  to  anybody  else.  A  good  bit  of 
ingenuity  may  be  exercised  on  it  and  the  outcome  will  be 
found  to  be  rather  surprising  if  not  very  conclusive  as  to  the 
purpose  for  which  the  experiment  was  tried.  But  the  results 
as  reported  may  be  of  some  value.  Personally,  I  believe  I 
can  follow  my  consciousness  down  to  where  I  can  recognize 
its  most  basal  remaining  "content"  to  be  an  awareness  of 
what  I  may  call  extension  without  definite  limitations.  It 
seems  to  me  I  can  detect  something  to  which  I  could  not, 
from  its  nature  alone,  apply  the  terms  "I"  or  "me"  as  some- 
thing differentiated  from  everything  else.  Possibly  what  I 
note  is  wholly  fanciful,  but  I  seem  to  feel  myself  in  about, 
the  condition  of  psychical  life  which  I  imagine  a  star  fish  is  in. 

Of  course  I  realize  how  far  such  a  statement  is  from  being 
purified  of  all  thought  and  other  ordinary  mental  elements. 
Nevertheless,  I  believe  it  to  be  of  some  value  as  evidence 
that  consciousness  is  an  attribute  of  the  organism  as  a 
whole,  and  can  neither  be  held  to  contain  an  element  which 
can  exist  separately  from  the  organism,  nor  be  restricted 
to  any  particular  part  of  the  organism  as  the  brain  or  the 
nervous  system.  There  seems  to  be  some  evidence  "directly 
felt  by  us  ourselves,"  and  that  evidence  points  to  thj.s  con- 
clusion as  to  the  nature  and  "seat"  of  consciousness.  The 
point  is  susceptible,  I  am  quite  sure,  of  rather  rigid  experi- 
mental examination.  However,  the  further  experiments 
which  have  suggested  themselves  to  me  involve  difficulties 
more  formidable  than  I  have  thus  far  been  in  position  to 
attempt. 

The  reader  acquainted  with  James's  notable  Chapter  X, 
"The  Consciousness  of  Self"  (The  Principles  of  Psychology, 
Vol.  1)  will  recognize  the  difference  between  such  introspec- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  53 

tive  experimentation  as  that  here  indicated,  and  that  so  il- 
luminatingly  described  by  James  as  tried  on  himself.  While 
James's  undertaking  was  to  give  an  account  of  the  thought 
and  other  processes  in  consciousness  as  he  could  observe  them 
in  himself,  what  I  want  to  accomplish  requires  me  to  get  rid 
of,  to  ignore  as  far  as  possible,  the  very  things  which  James 
was  studying.  I  want  to  find  whether  any  "content  of  con- 
sciousness" remains  after  thought  and  the  other  usual  men- 
tal contents  are  out  of  the  reckoning.  I  believe,  however, 
that  James  opens  the  way  to  such  an  hypothesis  as  mine. 
Thus  in  a  footnote  we  read,  "The  sense  of  my  bodily  exist- 
ence, however  obscurely  recognized  as  such,  may  then  be  the 
absolute  original  of  my  conscious  selfhood,  the  fundamental 
perception  that  /  am.  All  appropriations  may  be  made  to 
it  by  a  Thought  not  at  the  moment  immediately  cognized  by 
itself.  Whether  these  are  not  only  logical  possibilities  but 
actual  facts  is  something  not  yet  dogmatically  decided  in 
the  text."  15 

Except  for  a  little  misgiving  arising  from  uncertainty  as 
to  the  exact  meaning  of  "Thought"  in  this  quotation,  I  be- 
lieve my  hypothesis  does  what  James  says  his  text  leaves  un- 
decided. 

This  foot-note  of  James's  may  serve  as  a  switch  key  to 
shift  the  current  of  our  discussion  from  the  psycho-con- 
scious phase  of  life  through  the  psycho-physical  to  the  purely 
physico-chemical  phase.  The  course  along  which  this  shifting 
will  run  can  be  designated  thus:  full-fledged  intellect  (al- 
ready examined),  instinct,  emotion,  bio-physico-chemical  or- 
ganization. 

Instinct  and  Physical  Organization 

The  discussion  from  which  we  have  just  turned  of  the 
relation  between  "inner"  and  "outer,"  between  "subjective" 
and  "objective,"  must  be  regarded  as  meeting  the  require- 


54  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

ments  of  this  sketch  so  far  as  the  first  member  of  the  series 
is  concerned;  and  the  relation  between  instinct  and  physical 
organization  will  now  receive  attention.  The  evidence  of 
vital  connection  here  is  so  abundant  and  clear-cut,  and  the 
views  of  competent  observers  are  so  unanimous  that  the  sub- 
ject can  be  disposed  of  quite  summarily.  Probably  the  most 
indubitable  single  block  of  evidence  comes  from  nest-building 
and  cocoon-spinning  insects.  Many  of  the  facts  from  this 
field  have  been  so  much  exploited  for  the  very  purposes  to 
which  we  now  invoke  them  that  a  few  quotations  from  and 
remarks  upon  the  writings  of  naturalists  generally  acknowl- 
edged for  learning  and  judicious  thinking  will  suffice. 

We  turn  first  to  W.  M.  Wheeler,  and  take  to  begin  with, 
words  which  he  in  turn  quotes  from  Bergson:  "As  Bergson 
says,"  we  read,  "  'It  has  often  been  remarked  that  most  in- 
stincts are  the  prolongation,  or  better,  the  achievement,  of 
the  work  of  organization  itself.  Where  does  the  activity  of 
instinct  begin?  Where  does  that  of  nature  end?  It  is  im- 
possible to  say.  In  the  metamorphoses  of  the  larva  into  the 
nymph  and  into  the  perfect  insect,  metamorphoses  which 
often  require  appropriate  adaptations  and  a  kind  of  initia- 
tive on  the  part  of  the  larva,  there  is  no  sharp  line  of  de- 
marcation between  the  instinct  of  the  animal  and  the  organiz- 
ing work  of  the  living  matter.  It  is  immaterial  whether  we 
say  that  instinct  organizes  the  instruments  which  it  is  going 
to  use,  or  that  the  organization  prolongs  itself  into  the  in- 
stinct by  which  it  is  to  be  used.'  "  And  Wheeler  continues : 
"The  spinning  of  the  cocoon  by  the  larval  ant  is  a  good 
example  of  the  kind  of  instinct  to  which  Bergson  refers. 
From  one  point  of  view  this  is  merely  an  act  of  development, 
and  the  cocoon,  or  result  of  the  secretive  activity  of  the  seric- 
teries  and  of  the  spinning  movements  of  the  larva,  is  a  pro- 
tective envelope.  But  an  envelope  with  the  same  protective 
function  may  be  produced  by  other  insect  larvae  simply  as  a 
thick,  chitinous  secretion  from  the  whole  outer  surface  of  the 


An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness  55 

hypodermis.  Here,  too,  we  have  an  activity  which,  though 
manifested  in  a  very  different  way,  is  even  more  clearly  one 
of  growth  and  development.  And  when  the  workers  of 
(Ecophylla  or  Polyrhachi*  use  their  larvae  for  weaving  the 
silken  envelope  of  the  nest,  as  described  in  Chapter  XIII, 
we  have  a  further  extension  and  modification  of  the  cocoon- 
spinning  activities.  In  this  case  the  spinning  powers  of  the 
larva  are  utilized  for  the  purpose  of  producing  an  envelope, 
not  for  its  individual  self,  but  for  the  whole  colony.  In 
conventional  works  this  latter  activity  would  be  assigned  a 
prominent  place  as  a  typical  instinct,  the  spinning  of  the 
cocoon  might  also  be  included  under  this  head,  but  the  form- 
ation of  the  puparium,  or  pupal  skin,  would  be  excluded 
as  a  purely  physiological  or  developmental  process,  yet  thia 
last,  no  less  than  the  two  other  cases,  has  all  the  fundamental 
characteristics  of  an  instinct."  16 

Then  immediately  follows  this  statement,  especially  signi- 
ficant for  the  proposition  of  our  hypothesis  which  assigns  to 
the  individual  organism  the  chemical  value  of  an  elementary 
substance:  "Viewed  in  this  light  there  is  nothing  surprising 
about  the  complexity  and  relative  fixity  of  an  instinct,  for  it 
is  inseparably  correlated  with  the  structural  organization, 
and  in  this  we  have  long  been  familiar,  both  with  the  de- 
pendence of  the  complexity  and  fixity  of  parts  on  heredity 
and  the  modifiability  of  these  parts  during  the  life-cycle 
of  the  individual.  Fixed  or  instinctive  behavior  has  its 
counterpart  in  inherited  morphological  structure  as  does 
modifiable,  or  plastic,  behavior  in  well-known  ontogenetic 
and  functional  changes." 

The  statement  that  surprise  is  largely  taken  away  from 
such  elaborate  manifestations  of  instinct  as  those  here  de- 
picted, by  recognizing  that  the  instincts  are  "inseparably 
correlated  with  structural  organization"  and  have  their 
"counterpart  in  inherited  morphological  structure,"  will,  no 
doubt,  receive  the  assent  of  most  zoologists,  as  will  also  the 


56  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

statement  that  our  long  familiarity  with  structural  organi- 
zation and  morphological  inheritance  is  what  makes  us  re- 
gard these  without  surprise,  and,  by  inference,  as  compre- 
hensible. It  is  not  that  the  corporeal  form  and  structure  of 
the  worker  ants  and  of  the  larvae  which  they  manipulate  as 
spinning  instruments  and  shuttles  for  making  the  nest,  are 
necessarily  simpler  and,  on  that  account,  more  comprehen- 
sible than  are  the  instinctive  acts  of  the  workers,  but  that 
during  our  whole  lives  we  have  been  familiar  with  structure, 
and  ourselves  exist  as  "structural  organizations."  This  is 
equivalent  to  saying  that  we  have  always  been  not  only  learn- 
ing but  directly  experiencing  interdependences  and  correla- 
tions among  the  common  body-parts  and  body-acts,  and  so 
regard  them  as  comprehensible,  as  explicable.  To  compre- 
hend really  an  external  complex  of  structures  and  activities 
is  to  live  the  counterpart  of  it.  To  understand  such  a  com- 
plex scientifically  is  to  understand  it  through  a  course  of 
observation  and  reasoning;  that  is,  rationally.  To  explain 
such  a  complex  is  to  bring  in,  or  recognize  consciously  one  by 
one  the  constituent  elements  of  the  complex,  and  recognize 
all  these  as  parts  of  the  ensemble.  It  is  to  recognize  the 
elements  in  both  their  isolate  and  integrate  capacities. 

So  much  for  the  evidence  of  integration  between  instinct 
and  physical  organization  as  presented  by  one  carefully  phil- 
osophical naturalist.  Several  other  naturalists  have  gone 
nearly  as  far,  but  this  single  instance  is  so  typical  and  conclu- 
sive as  to  the  objective  facts  that  it  will  suffice.  In  com- 
menting on  the  significance  of  being  surprised  at  such  rarely 
witnessed  performances  as  those  furnished  by  these  ants, 
while  we  are  not  surprised  at  common  structures  and  acts 
of  equal  or  greater  complexity  furnished  by  more  familiar 
animals  and  by  ourselves,  I  go  beyond,  though  only  a  little 
beyond  Wheeler. 

The  only  other  zoologist  to  whom  I  turn  for  evidence  of 
vital  relation  between  instinct  and  structure  is  C.  O.  Whit- 


An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness  57 

man.  His  testimony  supplements  Wheeler's  in  that  it  is 
more  exclusively  and  radically  objective  than  is  Wheeler's; 
that  is,  it  verges  less  toward  the  subjective- type  of  presenta- 
tion and  draws  nearer  to  the  bio-chemical  ground  work.  Al- 
though Whitman  wrote  relatively  little  on  animal  behavior, 
that  little  seems  to  me  to  contain  some  of  the  most  important 
observations  and  conclusions  which  have  been  produced  in 
this  branch  of  zoology.  What  I  utilize  is  taken  from  his 
address  Animal  Behavior.  The  animals  upon  which  Whit- 
man's chief  studies  were  made  were  leeches  of  the  genus  Clep- 
sine;  a  salamander  (Necturus)  ;  and  pigeons  of  several  spe- 
cies. Our  purpose  will  be  best  served  by  quoting  a  few  sen- 
tences which  go  direct  to  the  heart  of  the  question  in  hand, 
that  namely  of  the  vital  connection  of  instinct  and  basal 
physical  structure.  "The  view  here  taken,"  Whitman  writes, 
"places  the  primary  roots  of  instinct  in  the  constitutional  ac- 
tivities of  protoplasm  and  regards  instinct  in  every  stage  of 
its  evolution  as  action  depending  essentially  upon  organiza- 
tion." 17  Then,  apparently  to  clarify  and  emphasize  the  last 
clause  about  the  dependence  of  instinct  or  organization,  he 
adds  a  footnote  thus :  "Professor  Loeb  refers  instinct  back 
to  '(1)  polar  differences  in  the  chemical  constitution  in  the 
egg  substance,  and  (£)  the  presence  of  such  substances  in  the 
egg  as  determine  heliotropic,  chemotropic,  stereotropic,  and 
similar  phenomena  of  irritability.'  According  to  this  view, 
the  power  to  respond  to  stimuli  lies  in  unorganized  chemical 
substances,  and  the  same  powers  exist  in  the  adult  as  in  the 
egg,  because  the  same  chemical  substances  are  present.  Or- 
ganization serves  at  all  stages  merely  as  a  mechanical  means 
of  giving  definite  directions  to  responses. 

"The  view  I  have  taken  regards  instinctive  action  as 
organic  action,  whatever  be  the  stage  of  manifestation.  The 
egg  differs  from  the  adult  in  having  an  organization  of  a 
very  simple  primary  order,  and  correspondingly  simple  pow- 
ers of  response.  Instinct  and  organization  are,  to  me,  two 


58  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

aspects  of  one  and  the  same  thing,  hence  both  have  onto- 
genetic  and  phjlogenetic  development." 

These  statements  show,  as  do  those  given  in  our  discussion 
of  the  cell-theory,  how  far  Whitman  went  away  from  full- 
fledged  elementalism  and  toward  organismalism.  But  his 
treatment  of  instinct  and  animal  behavior  reveals  what  his 
treatment  of  the  cell-theory  does  not,  at  least  so  clearly; 
namely,  how  far  he  also  went  on  the  way  to  the  natural  his- 
tory mode  as  contrasted  with  the  mechanistic  mode  of  phil- 
osophizing on  biological  phenomena.  And  this  gives  me  a 
pleasant  opportunity  to  testify  to  the  genuinely  naturalist 
current  that  ran  through  his  life  and  work.  An  unforgettable 
visit  which  I  had  with  him  among  his  pigeons  not  long  before 
he  died,  permitted  me  to  see  something  of  the  character  and 
depth  of  his  interest  in  those  animals.  His  whole  attitude 
toward  them — his  wonderfully  broad  information  about,  and 
understanding  of  their  general  ways  of  life  and  personal 
idiosyncrasies,  his  solicitude  for  them,  and  his  measured  af- 
fection for  them — was  such  as  is  never  displayed  by  any 
one  who  has  not  very  much  of  the  real  naturalist  about  him, 
in  his  personality  as  well  as  in  his  knowledge.  The  individual 
pigeons,  many  of  them  at  any  rate,  appeared  to  be  realities 
to  him  in  a  deep  sense  and  not  merely  "mechanical  means  for 
giving  definite  directions  to  responses"  of  chemical  sub- 
stances. But  after  all  this  is  said,  it  must  also  be  said  that 
there  is  no  evidence  that  Whitman  ever  grasped  fully  the  con- 
ception that  the  "constitutional  activities  of  protoplasm"  in 
which  he  believed  instincts  to  be  rooted,  must  be  the  consti- 
tutional activities  of  protoplasms  (protoplasm  in  the  plural 
number),  because  no  individual  pigeon  is  either  any  other  in- 
dividual nor  even  exactly  like  any  other;  and  also  that  the 
existence  of  protoplasms  is  dependent  upon  the  organisms 
to  which  they  belong  as  well  as  upon  the  chemical  substances 
of  which  they  are  composed.  Whitman  went  so  far  on  the 
road  toward  organismalism  as  to  believe  genuinely  in  the 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  59 

organic  and  organisation,  but  not  far  enough  to  make  him 
accept  unreservedly  individual  organisms. 

We  are  able  to  state  definitely  wherein  lies  the  great  and 
rather  unique  merit  of  Whitman's  investigations  on  animal 
behavior.  (1)  By  a  judicious  combination  of  pure  observa- 
tion and  observation  aided  by  experiment  and  conception,  he 
pushed  psychic  phenomena  in  the  form  of  instinct  down  al- 
most to  the  physico-chemical  level;  that  is,  to  the  proto- 
plasmic level.  (£)  He  at  the  same  time  remained  positively 
within  the  organic,  the  living  realm.  His  merit  is  that  of 
restraint  as  well  as  of  positive  achievement.  He  did  not  per- 
mit his  enthusiasm  for  physical  explanation  to  betray 
him  into  adopting  a  phraseology  which,  while  sounding  like 
an  explanation  of  instinct,  amounts  in  reality  to  a  denial  or 
a  repudiation  of  it. 

So  much  for  the  evidence  of  vital  connection  between  in- 
stinct and  organization.  According  to  the  schedule  indi- 
cated a  few  pages  back  for  reviewing  systematically  this  con- 
nection through  the  entire  range  of  psychic  life,  we  have 
next  to  glance  at  the  connection  between  the  emotions  and 
organization. 

Emotion  and  Physical  Organization 

Approaching  this  subject  as  we  now  are  from  the  direction 
of  psychology  proper,  the  well-known  James-Lange  interpre- 
tation of  emotion  comes  immediately  to  mind.  It  will  be 
advantageous  for  our  sketch  not  to  focus  attention  too  close- 
ly on  any  theory  or  discussion  but  to  take  in  as  much  as  we 
can  of  the  entire  field,  keeping  in  the  foreground  our  own 
personal  experiences  and  observations  as  contrasted  with  the 
descriptions  and  views  of  authorities.  What  I  mean  is  that 
the  reader  shall  take  himself  in  hand  for  serious  study  as  to 
his  emotional  life,  watching  himself  from  hour  to  hour,  day 
to  day,  and  year  to  year  under  all  the  varied  conditions, 


60  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

happenings,  purposes,  and  impulses  to  which  he  is  subject. 
In  doing  this  a  special  point  should  be  made  of  looking  back 
scrutinizingly  at  experiences  of  particular  satisfaction,  ela- 
tion, joy,  sorrow,  irritation,  anger,  fear,  dread,  humiliation, 
and  shame,  as  soon  after  their  occurrence  as  possible  that 
they  may  be  fresh  in  memory.  But  incidents  and  episodes 
of  one's  remoter  past  which  stand  out  with  special  vividness 
from  the  intensity  of  the  particular  emotions  when  they  were 
experienced,  or  because  of  results  which  flowed  from  them, 
will  be  found  illuminating. 

To  what  extent  and  in  what  particular  fashion  was  our 
bodily  organization  implicated  in  the  feelings  and  emotions 
we  experienced,  is  our  problem.  Fortunately  one  can  "live 
over  again"  as  we  say ;  can  "work  himself  into"  rather  pro- 
nounced emotional  states,  through  a  combination  of  memory 
and  imagination.  That  is,  he  can  be  much  of  a  genuine  dram- 
atist when  all  alone,  as  touching  events  and  scenes  of  his 
own  past  experience.  What  happens  to  your  body  when  you 
do  that  sort  of  thing?  is  the  central  question  before  us.  The 
very  criterion  by  which  you  answer  this  question  you  will 
find  will  be  that  of  how  far  the  body-manifestations  appro- 
priate to  the  particular  emotions  are  elicited  through  your 
efforts.  If  your  hands  do  not  clinch  somewhat,  if  many  of' 
your  arm,  leg,  and  abdominal  muscles  do  not  contract  some- 
what, if  your  respiration  does  not  quicken  somewhat,  and 
other  manifestations,  various  corporeal  indices  of  anger,  do 
not  appear  quite  independently  of  direct  intention  on  your 
part,  you  will  be  sure  you  have  not  "worked  up"  a  genuine 
state  of  anger.  The  only  real  knowledge  of  an  emotion  is  a 
lived  knowledge  of  that  emotion.  In  order  to  be  a  true  actor 
your  body  parts  must  act,  directly,  automatically,  spon- 
taneously, so  far  as  any  rational  purpose  is  concerned.  And 
what  is  true  of  anger  is  clearly  true  of  all  other  emotions. 

Our  emotional  activities  may  be  described  as  instinctive 
and   reflex  activities,    the   feeling-impulse    of   which    comes 

• 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  61 

through  intelligence,  but  is  not  of  intelligence — is  not  under 
the  direct  guidance  and  control  of  intelligence.  According 
to  this  interpretation  no  animal,  no  matter  how  highly  con- 
stituted as  to  instincts  and  reflexes,  could  have  emotion  un- 
less it  had  intelligence.  Emotional  activity  is  instinctive  and 
reflex  activity  of  an  intelligent  organism,  with,  however,  the 
element  of  intellect  eliminated  or  in  abeyance  for  the  time 
being  as  regards  these  particular  acts.  This  is  what  I  would 
call  the  natural  history  description  of  emotion.  And  I  be- 
lieve it  is  in  essential  accord  with  James's  conception  of  emo- 
tion, but  his  description  is  a  psycho-physiological  rather 
than  a  natural  history  description.  I  am  quite  sure  that 
what  I  have  just  said  means  virtually  the  same  as  the  follow- 
ing: "//  we  fancy  some  strong  emotion,  and  then  try  to  ab- 
stract from  our  consciousness  of  it  all  the  feelings  of  its 
bodily  symptoms,  we  find  we  have  nothing  left  behind,  no 
'mind-stuff'  out  of  which  the  emotion  can  be  constituted, 
and  that  a  cold  and  neutral  state  of  intellectual  perception 
is  all  that  remains."  18 

I  will  now  point  out  wherein  I  believe  the  natural  history 
description  and  interpretation  of  emotion  are  somewhat  truer 
and  better  than  those  given  by  James  and  other  physiologi- 
cal psychologists — and,  I  may  add — very  much  truer  and 
better  than  those  given  by  certain  writers  who  approach  the 
subject  from  the  physiological  side  pure  and  simple.  James's 
epigrammatic  statements  about  being  afraid  because  we 
tremble  when  we  meet  a  bear  in  the  woods ;  about  being  sorry 
because  we  cry ;  about  being  angry  because  we  strike,  do  his 
own  position  some  injustice,  I  think.  This  is  an  instance  in 
which  his  gift  for  piquant  writing  succeeded  too  well.  But 
the  fact  ought  to  be  noticed  that  what  he  actually  says  is 
that  as  between  the  usual  statement,  namely,  that  we  tremble 
because  we  are  afraid,  cry  because  we  are  sorry,  strike  be- 
cause we  are  angry,  and  his  way  of  stating  the  case,  his  way  is 
"more  rational."  It  is  only  relative,  not  absolute  truth,  he 


62  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

is  aiming  at  in  these  statements.  Nevertheless,  after  due  al- 
lowance is  made  for  an  expressional  miscue  to  some  extent, 
there  is  yet  substantial  defect  in  his  presentation.  Speaking 
in  general  terms,  the  defectiveness  is  not  so  much  in  the 
antithesis  set  up  as  in  the  restrictedness  implied.  Or,  bring- 
ing the  criticism  around  toward  our  particular  standpoint, 
the  statement  falls  short  of  being  organismal. 

W.  B.  Cannon  has,  I  believe,  indicated  the  direction  in 
which  the  adequate  statement  lies.  He  writes :  "We  do  not 
'feel  sorry  because  we  cry,'  as  James  contended,  but  we  cry 
because  when  we  are  sorry  or  overjoyed  or  violently  angry  or 
full  of  tender  affection — when  any  one  of  these  diverse  emo- 
tional states  is  present — there  are  nervous  discharges  by  sym- 
pathetic channels  to  various  viscera,  including  the  lachrymal 
glands.  In  terror  and  rage  and  intense  elation,  for  example, 
the  responses  in  the  viscera  seem  too  uniform  to  offer  a  satis- 
factory means  of  distinguishing  states  which,  in  man  at  least, 
are  very  different  in  subjective  quality.  For  this  reason  I 
am  inclined  to  urge  that  the  visceral  changes  merely  contri- 
bute to  an  emotional  complex  more  or  less  indefinite,  but 
still  pertinent,  feelings  of  disturbance  in  organs  of  which 
we  are  not  usually  conscious."  What  Cannon's  criticism 
amounts  to,  expressed  in  other  language  is :  while  freely 
granting  that  organs  and  functions  in  the  usual  physiologi- 
cal sense  play  an  essential  part  in  emotion,  neither  the  vis- 
ceral nor  any  other  single  set  of  organs  is  sufficient  to  account 
for  the  whole  of  any  emotion.  Visceral  changes  contribute 
to  the  "emotional  complex,"  but  the  real  source  of  the  feel- 
ings involved  is  embedded  elsewhere  and  more  broadly  in  the 
organization.  Cannon  suggests :  "the  natural  response  is  a 
pattern  reaction,  like  inborn  reflexs  of  low  order."  "The 
typical  facial  and  bodily  expressions,"  he  writes,  "automati- 
cally assumed  in  different  emotions,  indicate  discharge  of  pe- 
culiar groupings  of  neurones  in  the  several  affective  states." 

Without  stopping  to  examine  this  language  in  detail,  our 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  63 

aim  will  be  achieved  by  pointing  out  that  the  more  closely  the 
various  emotions  are  scrutinized,  and  the  more  effort  there 
is  made  to  refer  them  to  their  causes,  the  more  varied  are  they 
found  to  be,  and  the  more  widely  are  we  led  to  search  in  the 
organization  for  causal  factors.  The  mental  attitude  of  per- 
fect openness  toward  any  and  all  facts,  both  of  effect  and 
cause,  which  may  occur  in  a  given  organic  situation,  is  one 
of  the  leading  characterizations  of  the  organismal  conception. 
The  assertion  that  the  organism  as  a  whole  is  the  causal  ex- 
planation of  an  emotion  or  an  "emotion  complex"  is  justified 
by  two  considerations:  (1)  Except  for  the  organism  viewed 
alive  and  whole  and  under  both  its  ontogenic  and  phylogenic 
aspects,  the  emotion  would  not  exist;  and  (£)  so  wide-spread 
and  subtle  does  common  observation  recognize  the  parts  of 
the  organism  involved  to  be  in  many  of  its  emotional  activi- 
ties that  for  practical  purposes,  it  is  better  to  work  on  the 
hypothesis  that  all  parts  of  the  organism  are  implicated  than 
to  adopt  the  alternative  hypothesis  that  certain  parts  only 
are  involved;  that  is,  that  some  parts  are  not  involved. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  believe  that  in  spirit  James'  hypo- 
thesis is  organismal  even  though,  probably  from  his  training 
and  career  in  formal  anatomy,  physiology,  and  psychology, 
he  never  became  entirely  free  from  the  Body-Soul  antithesis 
and  the  dogmatisms  of  "nerve  physiology,"  which  have  so 
dominated  modern  physiology  and  psychology.  This  opinion 
I  base  on  the  general  tenor  of  his  discussions  particularly 
of  the  emotions,  rather  than  on  his  direct  formulation  of  his 
theory  of  emotion.  I  will  quote  a  few  passages  that  seem 
particularly  to  trend  in  this  direction.  "No  reader  of  the 
last  two  chapters  [The  Production  of  Movement,  and  In- 
stinct] will  be  inclined  to  doubt  the  fact  that  objects  do 
excite  bodily  changes  by  a  preorganized  mechanism,  or  the 
farther  fact  that  the  changes  are  so  indefinitely  numerous 
and  subtle  that  the  entire  organism  may  be  called  a  sound- 
mg-board,  which  every  change  of  consciousness,  however 


64  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

slight,  may  make  reverberate.  The  various  premutations  and 
combinations  of  which  these  organic  activities  are  susceptible 
make  it  abstractly  possible  that  no  shade  of  emotion,  how- 
ever slight,  should  be  without  a  bodily  reverberation  as 
unique,  when  taken  in  its  totality,  as  is  the  mental  mood  it- 
self. The  immense  number  of  parts  modified  in  each  emotion 
is  what  makes  it  so  difficult  for  us  to  reproduce  in  cold  blood 
the  total  and  integral  expression  of  any  one  of  them.  We 
may  catch  the  trick  with  the  voluntary  muscles,  but  fail  with 
the  skin,  glands,  heart,  and  other  viscera."  20  I  ask  the  read- 
er to  make  special  note  of  the  part  of  the  quotation  be- 
ginning, "The  various  permutations"  as  we  shall  have  more 
to  say  about  it  a  few  pages  farther  on. 

Again  we  read:  "Our  whole  cubic  capacity  is  sensibly 
alive ;  and  each  morsel  of  it  contributes  its  pulsations  of  feel- 
ing, dim  or  sharp,  pleasant,  painful,  or  dubious,  to  that  sense 
of  personality  that  every  one  of  us  unfamiliarly  carries  with 
him.  It  is  surprising  what  little  items  give  accent  to  these 
complexes  of  sensibility."  21  I  hope  the  reader  will  notice 
how  easy  it  would  be  for  me  to  contend  that  these  state- 
ments come  near  to  my  statement  about  "inner"  and  "outer," 
or  subjective  and  objective;  and  also  to  my  formal  hypo- 
thesis as  to  the  nature  of  consciousness.  However,  I  do  not 
wish  to  make  too  much  of  such  a  contention,  though  I  shall 
bring  up  the  point  again  presently.  All  I  want  to  do  just 
here  is  to  make  still  clearer  the  meaning  of  my  view  that 
James  was  organismal  in  spirit,  though  not  wholly  so  in  for- 
mal statement.  To  me  one  of  the  strongest  evidences  of 
this  was  his  obvious  effort,  as  indicated  by  these  and  many 
other  passages  in  many  other  writings  than  his  Psychology, 
to  describe  fully  the  phenomena  with  which  he  chanced  to 
deal.  As  I  have  remarked  in  substance  so  many  times  in  this 
book,  one  of  the  most  unmistakable  signs  of  the  elementalist 
attitude  in  biology  is  incomplete  and  more  or  less  perverted 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  65 

description.  And  nowhere,  perhaps,  in  the  whole  biological 
realm  is  there  a  better  chance  for  description  of  the  genuine- 
ly natural  history,  organismal  kind — the  kind  a  cardinal 
motto  of  which  is  "neglect  nothing,"  than  in  this  very  field 
of  human  emotions,  especially  of  one's  own  emotions.  Nor 
can  I  refrain  from  reminding  the  reader  that  one  of  the 
master  works  in  this  field  is  Darwin's  The  Expression  of  the 
Emotions  in  Man  and  Animals,  and  that  while  a  leading 
motive  of  its  author  was  to  interpret  the  emotions  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  theory  of  descent  and  the  natural  selec- 
tion hypothesis,  probably  the  most  lasting  value  of  the  work 
is  from  its  fullness  and  excellence  as  a  natural  history  de- 
scription of  the  emotions  and  their  objective  expression. 

As  to  the  fact  of  vital  interdependence  between  psychic 
life  and  physical  life  through  the  emotions,  personal  experi- 
ence and  observation,  backed  up  and  supplemented  by  many 
authoritative  writings,  among  which  those  of  Darwin  and 
James  stand  out  strongly,  there  seems  no  longer  any  room 
for  question.  The  role  of  the  emotions  as  between  "Body" 
and  "Soul"  may  be  crudely  likened  to  the  splice  which  a  skill- 
ful sailor  weaves  into  two  pieces  of  rope  in  joining  them  so 
that  there  shall  be  no  knot  and  as  great  strength  as  in  any 
other  part  of  the  rope.  In  the  recent  period  of  psychology 
— of  so-called  physiological  psychology — we  have  frequently 
heard  about  psychology  "without  a  Soul;"  and  such  an  idea 
has  seemed  repugnant  to  many  persons.  But  if  we  could 
show  that  this  modern  psychology  is  "without  a  Body"  by 
the  same  token  that  it  is  "without  a  Soul,"  the  legitimate  mis- 
givings about  the  soullessness  of  the  psychology  ought  to  be 
allayed.  And  really  the  organismal  conception  of  psychic 
life  is  seen,  especially  when  we  examine  it  in  the  phase  of  the 
emotions,  to  amount  to  such  a  composition  of  the  Body-Soul 
antithesis.  "Body"  we  can  see,  as  it  figured  in  the  old  psy- 
chology, virtually  signified  what  we  usually  mean  by  corpse, 


66  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

or  cadaver.  "The  Body,"  in  that  sense  was  not  alive  at  all. 
It  was  not  alive  because  all  the  life  was  taken  out  of  it  (by 
the  theoretical  antithesis)  and  put  into  "The  Soul." 

Glance  at  the  Equilibrative  Interaction  Between  "Body"  and 

"Soul" 

Going  forward  from  such  predominantly  observational 
descriptions  of  psychic  life  in  its  emotional  phase  as  those  of 
Darwin  and  James,  to  such  experimental  descriptions  as 
those  being  produced  by  the  investigations  of  Pawlow,  of 
Crile,  and  especially  of  Cannon,  we  are  getting  considerable 
insight  into  the  rationale  of  how  "Body"  and  "Soul"  vitalize 
each  other.  Modern  researches  on  the  physiology  or  the 
psychology  (which  one  calls  it  depends  entirely  on  the  direc- 
tion of  his  approach)  of  psychic  life  is  revealing  something 
of  the  why  and  how  of  the  poet's  instinctive  perception,  "Soul 
needs  Body  as  much  as  Body  needs  Soul."  Only  one  aspect 
of  this  "why  and  how"  need  be  noticed  in  the  present  discus- 
sion. That  is  the  fact  of  the  balancing  off  of  antagonistic 
emotions  to  make  the  normal  emotional  life  just  as  reflex- 
actions  and  instinctive  actions  are  largely  phenomena  of 
equilibration,  or  balancing-off. 

It  should  be  recalled  that  we  have  found  this  antagonistic- 
equilibrative  principle  to  run  through  the  entire  neuro-psy- 
chic  life.  In  the  strictly  reflex  phase  the  mode  of  operation 
of  the  opposing  muscles,  the  flexors  and  extensors  of  the 
limbs,  as  brought  out  by  Sherrington,  was  cited  as  a  good 
illustration  of  the  principle.  A  manifestation  of  the  prin- 
ciple in  a  broader  way,  as  measured  by  the  extent  of  organic 
parts  involved,  was  seen  in  the  relation  of  the  vagal  (cranial) 
and  splanchnic  (thoracico-lumbar)  autonomies,  as  empha- 
sized by  W.  B.  Cannon  (Chap.  19,  this  book)  this  illustra- 
tion being  chiefly  in  the  reflex  phase.  In  a  yet  higher 
phase  we  saw,  again  from  Cannon's  work,  the  principle 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  67 

in  operation  through  the  emotions  (Chap.  28)  thus  bring- 
ing it  up  to  the  phase  of  lower  conscious  life. 

The  reader  should  not  forget  the  insistence  throughout 
our  presentation  of  these  antagonistic  phenomena,  that  al- 
ways the  oppositions  and  antagonisms  and  competitions  are 
fundamentally  constitutive  as  to  the  normal  organism.  Even 
the  most  pronounced  of  them  are  yet  in  the  interest  of  the 
organism  as  a  whole.  They  are  always  partial  phenomena 
relative  to  the  whole  organism.  They  have  evolved  in  strict 
accordance  with  and  sub-ordination  to  the  fundamental  na- 
ture of  the  organism  in  its  totality.  The  opposing  muscles 
of  our  limbs  can  not  break  or  tear  one  another  under  normal 
conditions.  Even  antagonisms  among  the  parts  of  the  or- 
ganism are  possible  because  the  parts  belong  to  the  organism. 
The  antagonisms  of  the  parts  do  not  produce  the  organism, 
primarily,  but  are  themselves  produced  by  the  organism,  or 
at  least,  are  a  portion  of  the  means  or  methods  by  which  the 
organism  lives  and  enlarges,  develops  and  functions.  All  this, 
be  it  noticed,  holds  not  merely  as  touching  purely  physical 
organization  *  but  as  to  the  entire  gamut  of  psychic  life, 
at  least  up  to  and  including  instinctive  and  emotional  life. 

Support  of  the  Hypothesis  by  the  Physico-Chemical  Con- 
ception of  the  Organism 

This  prepares  us  for  the  final  step  of  switching  the  discus- 
sion from  the  psycho-conscious  aspect  of  life  to  the  bio- 
physico-chemical  aspect.  The  place  in  our  discussion  to 
which  this  return  naturally  takes  us  is  that  wherein  we  con- 
sidered the  organism's  chemical  nature  as  interpreted  by  phy- 
sical chemistry.  That  interpretation  has  been  presented  by 
several  physiologists  but  with  special  insight  and  cogency  by 
F.  G.  Hopkins.  For  example,  our1  citation  in  Chapter  4 

*  The  discussions  of  growth  and  chemico- functional  integration,  chap- 
ters 17,  18,  and  19,  The  Unity  of  the  Organism  should  be  read  in  this 
connection. 


68  An  Organism^al  Theory  of  Consciousness 

of  The  Unity  of  the  Organism,  the  statement  that  the  con- 
ception of  the  organism  as  a  chemical  laboratory  "is  rapid- 
ly gaining  ground,"  should  be  recalled,  as  should  also  the 
opinion  of  Hopkins:  "the  chemical  response  of  the  tissues 
to  the  chemical  stimulus  of  foreign  substances  of  simple 
constitution  is  of  profound  biological  significance,"  and 
that  further  study  of  the  phenomena  "must  throw  vivid 
light  on  the  potentialities  of  the  tissue  laboratories." 22 
So  far  this  chemical  laboratory  conception  of  the  tis- 
sues may  be  said  to  be  strictly  chemical;  but  let  us  recall 
what  the  interpretation  is  when  it  passes  from  chemistry  in 
the  exclusive  sense  to  physical  chemistry  and  becomes  more 
specific  as  to  the  laboratory  apparatus,  as  one  may  say, 
through  which  the  "tissues"  work.  In  other  words,  recall 
the  conception  of  the  cell  and  its  mode  of  operating,  as 
viewed  by  physical  chemistry.  The  quotations  given  in 
Chapter  4*  may  well  be  repeated  in  part:  ".  .  .  the  living 
cell  as  we  now  know  it  is  not  a  mass  of  matter  composed  of  a 
congregation  of  like  molecules,  but  a  highly  differentiated 
system ;  the  cell  in  the  modern  phraseology  of  physical  chem- 
istry, is  a  system  of  coexisting  phases  of  different  consti- 
tutions." 23  Then  from  this  review  our  own  contention,  set 
forth  especially  in  Chapter  7,  that  wherever  in  such  state^ 
ments  as  those  just  quoted  from  Hopkins  "the  term  cell  oc- 
curs the  term  organism  really  ought  to  be  used." 

It  is  important  for  our  cause  generally  that  the  full 
weight  of  our  argument  in  support  of  the  view  that  on  the 
strictly  physical  plane,  the  organism  rather  than  the  cett 
is  really  the  equilibration  system  toward  which  physico- 
chemical  knowledge  is  tending,  should  be  in  the  reader's  con- 
sciousness. At  this  point  if,  consequently,  this  is  not  so, 
he  is  urged  to  read  what  is  said  on  the  point  in  Chapters 
4  and  7  especially. 

Our  central  purpose  now  is  to  show  that  the  organismal 
hypothesis  of  consciousness  articulates  directly  and  natur- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  60 

ally  with  the  same  conception  of  the  organism.  Undoubtedly 
it  is  in  the  emotional  phase  of  psychic  life  that  this  articu- 
lation is  most  open  to  common  observation.  Compare,  for 
example,  James'  "Our  whole  cubic  capacity  is  sensibly  alive; 
and  each  morsel  of  it  contributes  its  pulsations  of  feeling, 
dim  or  sharp,  pleasant,  painful,  or  dubious,  to  that  sense  of 
personality  that  every  one  of  us  unfamiliarly  carries  with 
him,"  with  Hopkins'  "On  ultimate  analysis  we  can  scarcely 
speak  at  all  of  living  matter  in  the  cell;  at  any  rate,  we 
cannot,  without  gross  misuse  of  terms,  speak  of  the  cell- 
life  as  being  associated  with  any  one  particular  type  of  mole- 
cule. Its  life  is  the  expression  of  a  particular  dynamic  equil- 
ibrium which  obtains  in  a  polyphasic  system  .  .  .  'life'  as  we 
instinctively  define  it,  is  a  property  of  the  cell  as  a  whole, 
because  it  depends  upon  the  organization  of  processes,  upon 
the  equilibrium  displayed  by  the  totality  of  the  coexisting 
phases."  24  Also  compare  Hopkins'  statement  that  among 
the  different  "phases"  of  the  cell  in  which  its  life  inheres, 
"are  to  be  reckoned  not  only  the  differentiated  parts  of  the 
bio-plasm  strictly  defined  (if  we  can  define  it  strictly),  the 
macro-and-micro-nuclei,  nerve  fibers,  muscle  fibers,  etc.,  but 
the  materials  which  support  the  cell  structure,  and  which 
have  been  termed  metaplastic  constituents  of  the  cell,"  with 
James'  "each  morsel"  of  our  cubic  capacity  "contributes  its 
pulsations  of  feeling,  etc." 

The  congruity  of  these  statements  is  apparent  even  when 
taken  as  here  exhibited;  that  is,  each  as  standing  by  itself 
at  about  the  two  extremes  of  the  scale  of  life.  When,  how- 
ever, they  are  viewed  in  connection  with  my  general  argument 
that  "cell"  in  Hopkins'  statement  ought  to  be  replaced  by 
"organism";  and  in  connection  with  what  we  have  learned 
from  Cannon  and  others  about  the  mechanism  by  means  of 
which  the  organism  operates  in  the  phase  of  conscious  emo- 
tion, it  seems  as  though  our  organismal  hypothesis  of  con- 
sciousness comes  near  to  a  demonstration.  And  so  far  as 


70  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

ordinary  descriptive  natural  history  is  concerned,  I  believe 
this  to  be  true.  However,  I  recognize,  keenly  enough,  that 
from  the  standpoint  of  bio-chemistry,  and  physiology,  and 
also  from  that  of  philosophy  in  the  traditional  sense,  that 
demonstration  is  not  only  far  away,  but  is  attainable,  if  at 
all,  only  by  surmounting  very  formidable  difficulties.  So  I 
reassure  the  dubious  reader  that  all  I  am  claiming  is  that 
my  two  propositions  about  the  nature  of  consciousness  to- 
gether constitute  a  legitimate  scientific  hypothesis. 

Personality  and  Elementary  Chemical  Substances 

With  both  the  physico-chemical  aspect  and  the  psychical 
aspect  of  our  hypothesis  now  before  us  more  fully  and 
sharply  than  they  have  been  hitherto  we  will  examine  an  ob- 
jection to  it  which  I  apprehend  will  be  the  most  serious  the 
hypothesis  will  meet;  namely  that  to  the  proposition  that 
each  individual  organism  has  the  value  in  a  chemical  sense 
of  an  elementary  substance.  And  since  this  objection  will 
probably  be  more  intolerant  and  stubborn  from  the  side  of 
physics  and  chemistry  than  from  that  of  natural  history  and 
psychology  I  will  adjust  my  remarks  with  reference  to  the 
opposition  as  thus  anticipated. 

The  considerations  I  am  going  to  present  might  have  been, 
in  strict  expository  coherence,  presented  as  a  part  of  my 
discussion  of  the  uniqueness  of  the  individual  consciousness 
as  marked  by  its  necessary  privacy  and  its  difference  from 
all  other  individual  consciousness.  What  we  are  now  to 
emphasize  is  the  fundamentally  of  objective  as  contrasted 
with  subjective  personality  of  such  highly  developed  animals 
as  song  birds,  domesticable  animals,  and  civilized  man. 

A  complete  definition  of  "personality"  is  not  obligatory 
for  our  purpose.  Only  this  much  need  be  said  about  the 
meaning  we  shall  give  the  word:  First,  we  deny  the  right 
claimed  by  some  authors  to  make  personality  purely  psy- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  71 

chical,  or  spiritual — a  thing  of  the  "inner,"  or  "deeper" 
self;  "Self"  that  is,  in  a  thorough-going  subjectivistic  sense. 
It  is  on  this  ground,  as  I  understand,  that  some  psycholo- 
gists, as  G.  F.  Stout,  and,  apparently  C.  Lloyd  Morgan  25 
deny  personality  to  animals.  All  I  will  say  on  this  question 
here  is  that  I  am  quite  sure  that  every  close  observer  of  the 
higher  animals  will  recognize  that  if  he  undertakes  to  give  a 
truly  full  report  of  his  observations  on  their  behavior  he  will 
have  to  speak  of  the  personality  of  some  at  least  of  them 
just  as  he  would  of  the  personality  of  observed  human  beings, 
or  he  will  be  obliged  to  call  the  same  thing  by  some  other 
name — a  kind  of  procedure  against  which  we  have  spoken 
strongly  throughout  this  volume.  For  us,  whatever  person- 
ality may  be,  we  must  conceive  it  to  be  founded  upon,  and 
conformable  to,  the  organism.  "Organism"  must  be  the  more 
inclusive  term.  "Person"  must  stand  to  "Organism"  in  the 
logical  relation  of  species  to  genus. 

Another  meaning  of  personality  in  this  particular  dis- 
cussion will  concern  the  uniqueness  of  each  organism  as  to  its 
psychical  attributes  regarded  in  their  totality.  By  unique- 
ness I  mean  not  merely  the  fact  that  each  organism  is  itself, 
perceptually  regarded,  but  that  it  is  not  a  replica,  a  dupli- 
cate of  any  other.  It  is  not  only  another  organism  but  it  is 
in  some  measure  a  different  other  organism.  For  the  benefit 
of  those  physical-  and  metaphysical-minded  readers  who  have 
never  informed  themselves  much  about  the  facts  of  natural 
history  and  have  never  tried  seriously  to  think  in  the  nat- 
ural history  manner  I  would  remark  that  what  I  have  just 
said  concerning  the  uniqueness  of  the  individual  organism 
is  only  re-asserting  in  a  more  refined  way  what  botany  and 
zoology  have  recognized  more  or  less  definitely  since  Dar- 
win's time  at  least,  and  have  partially  expressed  in  the  terms 
"individual  difference"  and  "individual  variation." 

With  this  we  come  to  the  cardinal  point:  //  individual 
animal  organisms,  especially  individual  humans  under  civi- 


72  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

lization,  be  contemplated  with  due  heed  to  the  motto  "neglect 
nothing99  the  conviction  will  be  reached  that  each  and  every 
one  has  literally  as  much  of  uniqueness  about  it  as  has  an 
elementary  chemical  substance. 

In  order  to  bring  out  the  truth  of  this  statement  we  must 
exhibit,  in  the  regular  natural  history  manner,  the  resem- 
blances and  differences  between  chemical  elements  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  resemblances  and  differences  between  human 
beings  on  the  other,  and  then  pool  the  results  of  these  com- 
parisons. 

To  the  carrying  out  of  this  enterprise  the  so-called  peri- 
odic law  in  chemistry  is  of  very  great  importance.  The 
essence  of  this  law,  stated  from  the  natural  history  stand- 
point, is  that  the  chemical  elements  range  themselves  into 
natural  species  and  genera  after  much  the  fashion  that  plants 
and  animals  do ;  and  that  the  classification  is  based  mostly  on 
the  chemical  attributes  of  the  substances,  but  partly  on  their 
physical  attributes  also.  Thus  the  group  of  alkali  metals, 
that  to  which  lithium,  sodium,  and  potassium  belong,  is  a 
genus  is  the  sense  of  descriptive  natural  history,  its  species 
being  the  substances  mentioned  with  others  not  enumerated. 
Also  the  group  often  spoken  of  in  chemical  laboratories  as 
"the  iron  group" — the  genus  containing  the  species  iron,  co- 
balt, nickel,  platinum,  etc.,  illustrates  the  point.  Two  species 
of  the  last  genus,  iron  and  nickel,  will  be  used  in  our  study. 
Let  us  compare  some  household  utensil  made  of  iron  with  a 
similar  one  made  of  nickel.  For  the  ordinary  uses  to  which 
these  implements  would  be  put  the  difference  between  the  sub- 
stances of  which  they  are  made  would  hardly  be  noticed. 
The  higher  specific  gravity  of  nickel  (8.5  plus)  is  so  slight 
as  compared  with  that  of  iron  (7.8)  that  the  greater  weight 
of  the  nickel  implement  would  probably  not  be  noticed.  Nor 
would  the  slightly  lower  melting  point  of  nickel  nor  its  much 
lower  magnetic  capacity  be  recognized.  The  most  avail- 
able distinguishing  difference  is  in  color,  the  ordinary  house- 


An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness  73 

keeper  answering  you,  if  you  ask  how  she  knows  a  nickel 
from  an  iron  implement,  that  the  nickel  piece  is  silvery  bright 
while  the  iron  piece  is  black. 

See  now  what  this  means.  Actually,  as  is  well  known  to 
every  beginning  student  in  analytical  chemistry,  these  two 
metals  are  very  similar  in  color  as  well  as  in  other  physical 
attributes — so  much  so,  in  fact,  that  some  authors  apply 
the  same  term  "silver  white"  to  both.  What  a  housekeeper 
really  means  when  she  says  she  knows  one  implement  to  be 
of  nickel  because  it  is  bright  and  the  other  to  be  of  iron 
because  it  is  black,  is  that  she  is  depending  on  a  chemical 
rather  than  a  physical  attribute  for  a  distinguishing  mark ; 
the  attribute,  that  is,  in  virtue  of  which  iron  is  acted  upon 
much  more  readily  by  oxygen  in  the  presence  of  moisture 
than  is  nickel.  The  much  greater  liability  of  iron  than 
nickel  to  tarnish  and  rust  is  a  chemical  rather  than  a  phy- 
sical difference  between  them.  This  fact,  namely  that  of 
the  dependence  of  distinguishing  differences  between  sub- 
stances more  upon  chemical  than  upon  physical  attributes  is 
of  very  wide  applicability  in  nature,  and  is  greatly  impor- 
tant both  scientifically  and  philosophically. 

Now  turn  from  comparing  these  two  elementary  chemical 
substances  to  a  comparison  of  any  two  human  organisms,  or 
persons  who  might  be  members  of  a  household  to  which 
the  implements  might  belong.  And  make  the  comparison  first 
on  the  basis  of  the  physical  attributes  just  as  we  began 
comparing  the  implements  of  nickel  and  iron.  Does  any 
reader  doubt  that  he  would  find  it  much  easier  to  distinguish 
the  persons  than  the  metals?  As  to  purely  morphological, 
that  is,  physical  differences  between  almost  any  two  persons 
(with  the  possible  exception  of  certain  rare  instances  of 
"identical"  twins),  there  is  no  room  for  question.  General 
shape  of  head,  face  and  features,  and  the  size  and  propor- 
tions of  the  various  parts  of  the  body  furnish  many  unmis- 
takable distinguishing  attributes. 


74  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

On  the  Psychology  of  Subjective  and  Objective  Personality 

But  unerring  as  are  the  differentiating  marks  on  the 
physical  side,  such  marks  are  few  as  compared  with  those 
on  the  psychical  side.  Noting  first  certain  merely  physico- 
psychical  differences  think  of  the  manners  of  speech  and  of 
hand  writing,  to  mention  only  two  items  !  Undoubtedly  these 
differences  are  to  a  considerable  extent  physical  but  no  one 
would  seriously  question  that  psychical  factors  come  in  all 
along  the  line.  This  is  perhaps  most  obvious  in  speech  as 
evidenced  by  voice  modulations,  intonations,  gesticulations, 
and  facial  and  bodily  expressions.  Again,  differentials  are 
everywhere  recognizable  in  responses  to  sensory  stimuli, 
especially  in  the  matter  of  reaction-time.  There  are  the 
quick  and  accurate  persons,  and  the  quick  and  inaccurate 
ones ;  and  there  are  the  slow  and  accurate  and  the  slow  and 
inaccurate  types,  to  go  only  a  step  in  description  and  classi- 
fication on  this  basis. 

Then  we  proceed  to  compare  the  unequivocal  psychical 
phases  of  life:  the  feeling,  the  emotional,  the  esthetic,  the 
religious,  and  the  intellectual  phases.  Here  we  pass  into 
a  realm  of  what  might  properly  be  called  objective  privacy 
in  psychology,  individuals  for  the  study  of  which  would  be 
largely  the  student's  most  intimate  and  most  enduring  friends 
and  associates,  human  and  animal.  Such  a  psychology  would 
be  undeniably  so  particular  and  intimate  that  much  of  it 
would  be  unpublishable  even  if  it  had  an  interest  beyond 
the  few  persons  concerned.  At  the  same  time  there  are  some 
portions  of  it  of  great  public  importance,  one  such  por- 
tion being  exactly  what  we  are  in  need  of  in  the  present  dis- 
cussion. I  refer  to  the  exceedingly  familiar  but  scientifically 
much  neglected  definite  and  sustained  psychical  differences 
of  individuals  who  by  reason  of  being  members  of  the  same 
household  or  same  small  community  are  subject  to  nearly 
identical  influence  so  far  as  concerns  such  fundamental  en- 


An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness  75 

vironic  factors  as  food  in  the  narrow  sense,  drink,  air,  light 
and  temperature.  The  duty  before  us  is  that  of  testifying  to, 
of  viseing,  the  objectively  psychical  individual  as  we  did  the 
subjectively  psychical  individual  earlier  in  this  sketch. 
"What  is  needed,"  writes  Sellars,  "is  not  vague  statements  to 
the  effect  that  individuals  cannot  be  separated  or  that  they 
are  aspects  of  one  another,  but  definitions  and  analyses."  26 
Sellars  is  here  raising  his  voice  against  the  tendency  in 
present-day  social  psychology  to  make  the  individual  a  kind 
of  incident  in  the  social  order,  a  by-product  of  Society.  It 
is  a  satisfaction  that  the  regular  course  of  my  psychological 
argument  has  brought  me  to  where  I  also  may  contribute 
something  to  the  definition  and  analyses  essential  to  check- 
ing the  tendency  indicated  by  Sellars.  If  it  can  be  shown 
biologically  and  psychologically  all  in  one  that  personality 
is  indubitably  objective,  both  substantively  and  kinetically, 
not  only  the  Individual  but  Society  will  be  the  gainer,  I  am 
very  sure.  For  my  contribution  we  will  examine  in  outline 
what  may  appropriately  be  called  the  action-system  (adopt- 
ing and  expanding  Jennings'  term)  as  it  manifests  itself  in 
a  small  homogeneous  group  of  human  beings.  Our  study  will 
be,  in  other  words,  one  in  domestic  and  neighborhood  psy- 
chology. 

The  "material"  in  this  instance  must  be  my  own  household 
and  the  handful  of  persons  constituting  the  colony  of  the 
Scripps  Institution  for  Biological  Research.  This  group 
is  rather  specially  favorable  for  such  a  study  in  that  its 
geographic  severance  from  other  groups,  and  its  strictly 
rural  habitat  give  it  an  exceptionally  natural,  simple,  and 
uniform  environment.  The  analysis  might  run  along  any 
one  or  all  of  several  axes ;  but  our  purpose  will  be  accom- 
plished by  following  one  only.  That  one  shall  be  the  reac- 
tion, the  behavior,  of  individual  members  of  the  group  in 
response  to  the  stimulus  of  the  world  war.  Were  complete- 
ness to  be  aimed  at  in  the  analysis,  every  individual  in  the 


76  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

group  would  have  to  be  considered.  Such  a  treatment  would 
be  highly  instructive  but  space  limitations  forbid  us  going  to 
such  length.  We  must  restrict  ourselves  to  a  few  of  the 
more  pronouncedly  individualistic  behaviors  and  must  treat 
even  these  in  a  very  sketchy  fashion.  To  be  remarked  at 
the  outset  is  the  fact  that  every  member  of  the  group  is 
deeply  loyal  to  America  and  to  the  cause  of  the  Allies.  On 
the  very  door-sill  of  the  examination  we  recognize  two  well- 
differentiated  aspects  to  each  person's  action-system,  namely 
an  aspect  of  commonality  for  nearly  all  members  of  the 
group ;  and  an  aspect  of  very  pronounced  differentially  for 
many  of  them. 

Behaviors-in-common  will  receive  attention  first.  In  the 
uniform  growth,  from  the  very  beginning  of  the  struggle  in 
August,  1914,  of  belief  in  the  general  Tightness  of  the  cause 
of  the  Entente ;  of  realization  of  the  meaning  of  the  struggle ; 
and  of  sentiments  and  resolutions  of  devotion  to  the  foreign 
nations  with  which  our  nation  is  finally  joined,  these  experi- 
ences have  been  very  much  at  one.  To  be  sure  this  common- 
ness has  fallen  far  short  of  identity.  But  as  to  essentials 
resemblance  has  been  far  greater  than  difference.  For  ex- 
ample every  adult  has  accepted  unhesitatingly  his  and  her 
obligations  to  the  Red  Cross ;  to  the  appeals  for  aid  from 
Belgium,  France,  and  the  other  despoiled  countries ;  to  the 
increasing  cost  of  living;  to  the  buying  of  Government 
Bonds ;  and  to  the  appeals  and  regulations  of  the  Food  Ad- 
ministration. Naturally  there  has  been  difference  in  the 
particular  way  and  extent  of  response  of  each  in  these  mat- 
ters ;  but  in  essence  there  has  been  nothing  differential. 

We  turn  now  to  behavior-not-in-common ;  behavior,  that 
is,  which  has  differentiated  the  members  personally  with 
great  sharpness.  This  examination  is  much  more  important 
for  the  subject  in  hand.  The  reference  here  is  to  each  one's 
"bit"  as  the  common  phrase  had  it  when  our  country  was 
first  entering  the  conflict.  The  '%ar  work"  (as  the  expres- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  77 

sion  has  gradually  become  with  the  advance  toward  the  cli- 
max of  the  gigantic  struggle)  into  which  each  has  gravitated 
has  much  the  appearance  of  the  naturalness  and  inevitability 
presented  by  the  falling  of  a  stone  or  the  flowing  of  water. 
The  case  grows  so  significant  at  this  point  that  I  must  par- 
ticularize somewhat  more  than  I  have  heretofore.  A  becomes 
an  acknowledged  leader  in  "drives"  for  Red  Cross  funds, 
Liberty  Bond  sales,  etc.  B  becomes  a  regular  consultant 
on  the  knitting  of  Red  Cross  articles.  C  is  a  highly  skilled 
deviser  and  maker  of  dishes  from  "substitute"  foods.  D 
is  appointed  an  official  of  the  National  Food  Administra- 
tion. E  becomes  an  official  teacher  of  girls  and  women  as  to 
the  peculiar  duties  and  obligations  of  their  sex  in  war  times. 
F  concentrates  nearly  the  whole  of  his  physical  energy  upon 
an  elaboration  of  the  view  that  a  victory  over  Germany  and 
her  allies  cannot  be  really  complete  without  being  spiritual 
as  well  as  material — that  the  philosophy  or  theory  of  life 
being  fought  for  by  Germany  must  be  overthrown  as  well  as 
her  armed  forces.  Of  the  forty  adult  members  of  the  group 
fully  one-half  have  been  incited  in  a  special  degree  to  some 
activity  that  has  a  distinct  personal  character,  some  of  these, 
as  above  indicated,  being  very  pronouncedly  so.  The  per- 
sonality of  these  reactions  comes  to  view  most  distinctly  in 
the  fact,  absolutely  certain  to  an  observer  whose  acquain- 
tance with  the  persons  has  been  intimate  and  has  extended 
over  some  years,  that  no  one  of  those  who  has  settled  into 
one  of  the  special,  definite,  and  important  pieces  of  work 
could  wholly  replace  any  of  the  others  in  their  special  tasks. 
Probably  each  could  do  something  at  the  "job"  of  any  of 
the  others  were  conditions  such  as  to  force  him  to  try;  but 
success  under  such  conditions  would  surely  be  partial,  very 
much  so  in  some  of  the  cases. 

This  automatic  definition  and  classification  of  persons  sub- 
ject to  a  common  major  stimulus,  with  nearly  the  same  gen- 
eral environic  conditions,  and  with  almost  complete  freedom 


78  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

of  action  so  far  as  concerns  the  particular  stimulus,  seems 
to  me  a  phenomenon  of  very  great  importance  since  it  de- 
pends upon  principles  of  organic  beings,  especially  upon 
principles  of  civilized  man's  "being,"  which  are  well-nigh  if 
not  entirely  universal,  I  am  sure.  Undoubtedly  the  phenom- 
enon is  often  much  obscured  through  counteracting  ele- 
ments in  the  environment,  especially  in  social  customs,  eco- 
nomic conditions  and  general  education  among  civilized  men. 
But  in  spite  of  all  these,  attentive  observation  will  nearly 
always  be  able  to  recognize  it.  Highly  significant  is  it  as 
bearing  on  this  particular  aspect  of  the  matter,  that  the 
niches  finally  found  by  most  of  the  persons  were  obviously 
determined  to  some  extent  by  long  continued  previous  activi- 
ties and  unmistakable  natural  "gifts." 

Another  noteworthy  fact  is  the  clear  indication  of  not 
mere  acceptance,  but  positive  satisfaction  on  the  part  of 
most  if  not  all  the  persons,  once  they  are  "settled"  to  their 
"jobs,"  this  satisfaction  prevailing  despite  the  strenuousness, 
perplexity,  and  wear-and-tear  entailed.  During  the  first 
weeks  of  America's  plunge  into  the  maelstrom  the  anxious 
psychical  casting  about  in  our  little  group,  as  throughout 
the  whole  land,  presents  to  the  anthropological  biologist  as 
he  looks  back  upon  it  a  case  of  trial  and  error  on  a  gigantic 
scale,  the  scene  being  replete  with  jumbled  elements  of  noble 
zeal,  splendid  efficiency,  mis-expenditure  of  strength  and 
funds,  and  ludicrous  proposals.  But  out  of  this,  as  out  of 
this  unprecedented  instance  of  world-wide  "struggle  for  ex- 
istence," there  is  quite  sure  to  come,  indeed  is  coming,  as  one 
of  its  first  fruits,  personality  more  real  and  powerful  and 
fuller  of  grandeur  than  ever. 

While  personalities  come  forth  with  special  distinctness 
of  outline  and  forcefulness  of  expression  during  occasional 
events  of  vast  import  to  the  race  like  the  present  war  in- 
volving literally  the  whole  civilized  portion  of  the  human 
species,  yet  I  would  insist  that  the  difference  between  the 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  79 

manifestations  at  such  times  and  at  ordinary  times  is  al- 
most entirely  one  of  degree,  rather  than  of  essential  nature. 
The  attentive  observer  will  not  fail  to  find  personalities  as 
here  understood  always  and  everywhere,  no  matter  how  sim- 
ple and  lowly  the  lives,  and  monochrome  the  external  condi- 
tions. In  little  details  of  intelligent,  but  still  more  of  reflex, 
instinctive,  and  emotional  life,  all  of  which  compounded  to- 
gether makes  what  we  often  call  temperament,  the  keen  and 
sympathetic  observer  will  always  see  persons  in  the  deep 
sense  here  indicated.  Not  the  transcendent  genuises  merely, 
the  Aristotles,  the  Shakespeares,  the  Napoleons,  have  the 
right  to  be  called  personalities,  because  of  the  unique  powers 
with  which  they  are  endowed ;  but  each  and  every  one  of  civi- 
lization's humblest-ranked  myriads,  and  each  and  every 
nature-tutored  denizen  of  the  virgin  forest,  of  the  untilled 
plain,  and  of  the  unregenerate  desert,  have  the  same  right- 
in-kind. 

Personality  and  the  "Breath  of  Life"  Viewed  in  the  Light 
of  Physical  Chemistry  of  the  Organism 

Swinging  the  discussion  back  now  on  the  physico-chemical 
aspect  of  the  organism,  I  recall  first  the  truth  alluded  to  a 
little  while  ago,  namely,  that  it  is  preeminently  the  chemical 
rather  than  the  physical  attributes  of  elementary  inorganic 
substances  which  furnish  the  distinguishing  marks  of  these 
substances.  Even  in  the  inorganic  world  we  saw  that  sub^ 
stances  are  most  readily  and  decisively  differentiated  from  one 
another  by  the  transformation-products  resulting  from  the 
reaction  of  the  substances  upon  one  another.  "Transforma- 
tion of  energy,"  using  a  form  of  expression  favored  by  the 
disembodying  tendencies  in  recent  chemical  theory,  is  the 
most  distinctive  thing  about  all  chemistry,  inorganic  as  well 
as  organic.  The  oxidation  and  other  chemically  reactive 
changes  and  products  of  nickel  and  iron,  we  noticed,  are  the 


80  An  Orgamsmal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

most  differentiative  things  about  these  metals.  Let  us  push 
the  application  of  this  criterion  of  difference  a  little  farther 
in  comparing  human  persons.  We  give  energy-transforma- 
tion and  work  performed  a  leading  place  here  also.  And 
being  naturalistically  chemical  rather  than  chemically  chem- 
ical we  are  forced  to  touch  the  "high  spots"  only  at  first 
regardless  of  what  may  be  in  between  them.  We  are  free  to 
seize  upon  the  end  or  completed  products  of  the  reactions 
and  transformations.  What  reaction-products,  I  ask,  of 
nickel  and  iron  towards  any  other  substance  or  set  of  condi- 
tions are  more  unlike  than  the  reaction-products  of  an  effi- 
cient Department-of-Justice  official,  let  us  say  and  an  ef- 
ficient food  conserving  house-keeper,  in  this  time  of  common 
national  danger?  Yet  these  diverse  products  may  come  from 
not  only  the  same  danger  stimulus,  but  likewise  from  as  nearly 
identical  physico-chemical  environic  stimuli  as  it  is  possible 
to  secure.  Were  official  and  house-keeper  to  eat  of  the  same 
food,  drink  of  the  same  fluids,  breathe  of  the  same  air,  and 
be  subject  to  the  same  temperatures  month  in  and  month 
out  the  difference  in  product  would  not  be  a  whit  less. 

So  stands  the  case  when  viewed  in  its  "high  places"  only. 
But  the  high  places  are  as  real  places  as  any  whatever.  No 
realities,  it  matters  not  how  obscure  or  subtle,  pertaining  to 
the  intermediate  places,  can  make  the  high  places  other 
than  what  they  are.  Judging  human  beings  by  what  they  do, 
by  work  done  through  the  transformation  of  the  substances 
and  energies  which  they  take  from  the  external  world,  their 
personalities  are  surely  not  less  well-attested  than  are  the 
individualities  of  elementary  chemical  substances.*  But  it 
will  not  do  to  be  satisfied  with  touching  the  high  places  in 
this  rather  jaunty  fashion.  Some  attention  must  be  given  to 

*  A  rather  full  discussion  of  the  point  here  touched  may  be  found  in 
my  essay,  The  Higher  Usefulness  of  Science,  where  I  raise  and  try  to 
answer  the  query,  "What  is  nature  because  man  is  a  part  of  it?"  Per- 
haps a  less  ambiguous  way  of  asking  the  question  would  be,  "What  must 
nature  be  in  'order  that  it  may  produce  such  an  animal  as  man?" 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  81 

the  subtler  aspects  of  the  problem.  The  little  we  shall  do 
in  this  way  may  be  introduced  by  the  query,  what  reason 
is  there  for  including  in  our  hypothesis  the  supposition  that 
it  is  "some  substance  in  the  air,  almost  certainly  oxygen," 
with  which  the  organism  reacts  chemically,  to  produce  con- 
sciousness and  all  other  phenomena  of  life?  Why  single  out 
this  substance  from  the  other  elementary  substances  essential 
to  life,  as  for  instance  carbon  or  nitrogen?  *  My  reply  be- 
gins by  recalling  the  immemorial  recognition  of  the  "breath 
of  life"  the  "life  giving  air"  and  so  on,  of  universal  experi- 
ence. It  is  well  to  recall  likewise  such  semi-philosophic  con- 
ceptions as  that  of  the  pneuma  or  "psychical  breath  of  life" 
of  later  Greco-Roman  philosophy.  The  inextricable  en- 
tanglement, historically,  of  breath  and  air  with  spirits  is 
also  worth  remembering,  especially  the  continuance  of  this 
into  the  modern  period  of  scientific  analysis,  unmistakeable 
traces  of  which  are  seen  in  the  writings  of  William  Harvey 
and  the  foremost  physiologists  of  the  era  to  which  he  be- 
longed. For  example,  the  spiritus  nitro-aereus  of  John 
Mayow  which,  we  now  know,  was  his  term  for  oxygen  as 
glimpsed  first  in  the  history  of  science,  may  be  mentioned. 

More  important  than  any  of  these  reminders  from  the  his- 
tory of  knowledge  is  that  of  the  familiar  fact  that  the  most 
crucial  evidences  of  truly  independent  or  autonomous  life  of 
the  individual  higher  animal  are  respiratory.  That  the  new 
born  human  babe's  first  breathing-act  is  its  first  genuine  in- 
dependent life-act  is  one  of  the  most  commonplace  of  truths. 
And  recall  how  the  "return  of  life"  as  we  say  of  the  nearly 
drowned  person,  and  of  one  who  has  "fainted  dead  away" 
is  marked  by  the  resumption  of  respiratory  activities.  Cer- 
tain reflexes,  as  those  from  stimulating  the  eyelids,  and  pos- 

*  The  argument  in  answer  to  this  query  should  be  taken  as  an  exten- 
sion of,  and  in  important  respects  a  replacement  of,  that  contained  in 
my  essay,  Is  nature  infinite?  wherein  I  discuss  the  specificity  of  in- 
dividual organisms  as  indicated  by  how  they  use  their  nutrient  sub- 
stances. 


82  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

sibly  certain  heart  flutterings,  may  be  more  persistent  move- 
ments than  those  connected  with  breathing.  But  these  are 
less  certain  signs  of  individual  life.  It  is  only  to  philosophy 
of  the  elementalist  sort  that  the  mere  twitch  of  a  hand  or  an 
eyelid  or  a  trace  of  heart  action  would  be  a  satisfactory 
proof  of  life.  Nor  would  it  be  to  a  philosopher  of  this  school 
should  the  "living  substance"  under  observation  happen  to 
pertain  to  a  loved  relation  or  friend.  Satisfactory  evidence 
of  life  in  this  case  would  come  only  with  the  nearly  simul- 
taneous return  of  breathing  and  consciousness.  A  right 
interesting  section  could  be  written  at  this  point  on  the 
importance  of  nutriment  in  the  ordinary  sense,  and  of  drink, 
as  compared  with  air  at  the  very  beginning  and  ending  stages 
of  the  individual  life.  For  instance  such  questions  would 
have  to  be  considered  as  that  of  the  independence  of  the  new 
individual  for  a  while  at  the  outset  on  food-yolk  in  many 
animals  below  the  mammals,  and  on  placental  connections  in 
mammals ;  that  is  on  material  metabolically  elaborated  by 
the  older  or  parent  individual.  But  such  a  discussion  not 
being  indispensable  to  this  sketch,  must  be  foregone.  Enough 
here  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  while  it  may  be  entirely  jus- 
tifiable to  regard  oxygen  as  a  food  as  some  good  modern 
physiologists  do  the  two  important  facts  should  never  be  lost 
sight  of  that  (1)  oxygen  (air)  is  the  one  and  only  ever- 
present  and  never  varying  constituent  of  the  dietary.  In 
other  words  that  it  is  the  one  constituent  which  nature  sup- 
plies as  by  "free  grace"  to  use  a  good  old  theological  ex- 
pression; and  that  (2)  oxygen  is  the  one  and  only  food  that 
needs  no  digesting  and  so  no  digestive  organs  or  tissues  set 
apart  for  its  metabolic  elaboration.* 

Oxygen  is  the  only  food  which  passes  directly  as  such  to 

*Were  the  view  held  by  some  physiologists,  that  the  alveolar  epithe- 
lium of  the  lungs  transmits  atmospheric  oxygen  to  the  blood -by  an  active 
process  spoken  of  as  a  secreting,  this  statement  would  need  modifying 
somewhat.  However,  the  view  does  not  seem  to  be  accepted  by  most 
authorities. 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  83 

every  part  of  the  organism.  In  oxygen  the  organism  finds 
one  of  its  most  fundamental  food  materials  for  which  it  does 
not  normally  have  to  go  in  search  or  to  compete  with  other 
organisms.  The  familiar  fact  and  its  significance  appear  not 
to  have  attracted  the  attention  of  biologists  much.  Even 
L.  J.  Henderson  who  has  written  so  illuminatingly  on 
many  aspects  of  organic  adaptiveness  says  nothing  definite 
on  this  point.  These  two  facts  are  weighty  reasons  for  my 
proposal  to  look  upon  oxygen  as  one  chemically  elementary 
substance  and  the  organism  as  another,  the  reaction  be- 
tween which  is  basal  in  the  production  of  consciousness  and 
all  life  phenomena.  Consequently  the  problem  of  how,  ex- 
actly, the  organism  endowed  with  full-fledged  consciousness 
reacts  toward  oxygen  is  certainly  one  of  the  most  important 
of  all  problems  on  the  purely  physico-chemical  side  of  life. 
And,  as  said  early  in  this  sketch,  it  is  just  here  that  my  the- 
ory is  most  avowedly  hypothetical.  It  would  be  quite  out  of 
the  question  to  present  in  the  remaining  pages  of  this  book, 
even  had  I  the  requisite  knowledge  for  doing  so,  all  that 
might  profitably  be  said  on  the  subject.  Consequently  only 
two  or  three  of  what  seem  to  me  the  most  crucial  matters  will 
be  mentioned. 

In  the  first  place  I  ask  the  reader  to  recall  what  has  been 
said  in  various  of  the  preceding  chapters  which  have  brought 
out  the  indubitable  trend  of  the  interpretation  of  life  phe- 
nomena according  to  the  principles  of  physical  chemistry, 
away  from  the  elementalistic  conception  of  the  organism. 
The  interpretation  of  the  organic  cell  as  a  system  of  phases 
in  dynamic  equilibrium,  so  strongly  set  forth  by  Hopkins 
and  Bayless  will  be  remembered.  And  this  will  call  to  mind 
the  sharp  way  in  which  the  new  conception,  with  its  appeal 
to  the  role  of  surface-layers,  membranes,  and  areas  of  con- 
tact between  all  sorts  of  constituent  substances,  sets  itself 
over  against  such  pseudo-objective  conceptions  as  that  of 
biogens,  not  to  mention  the  horde  of  out  and  out  subjectivis- 


84<  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

tic  "elements"  of  which  pangens  and  determinants  have  per- 
haps had  the  greatest  vogue.  The  importance  of  the  anti- 
elementalistic  tendency  of  physical  chemistry  when  it  comes 
to  be  applied  to  biological  problems  is  greatly  enhanced,  it 
appears  to  me,  by  the  circumstance  that  J.  Willard  Gibbs, 
who  was  one  of  the  very  first  to  appreciate  in  a  full  scientific 
sense  the  importance  of  massive  as  contrasted  with  minute- 
particle  phenomena  in  inorganic  nature,  and  so  was  one  of 
the  "fathers"  of  physical-chemistry,  made  no  assumptions 
about  the  invisible  composition  of  substances  in  his  treat- 
ment of  "Heterogeneous  Equilibrium"  and  allied  topics. 
"Certainly,"  writes  Gibbs,  "one  is  building  on  an  insecure 
foundation  who  rests  his  work  on  hypotheses  concerning  the 
constitution  of  matter."  27  If  this  is  true  as  touching  the 
relatively  simple  structures  and  movements  in  the  lifeless 
world  how  much  more  obviously  true  is  it  as  touching  the  liv- 
ing world,  and  especially  such  life  phenomena  as  human  con- 


sciousness ! 

So  we  are  able  to  requisition  one  of  the  admittedly  most 
important  advances  of  modern  times  in  inorganic  science  as 
support  for  the  supposition  that  the  air  we  breathe,  and 
presumably  its  oxygen,  contributes  in  some  direct  and  funda- 
mental way  to  the  production  of  consciousness  even  though 
this  substance,  if  its  "ultimate  nature"  is  what  inorganic 
chemistry  and  physics  have  hitherto  attributed  to  it,  has  lit- 
tle or  nothing  to  suggest  that  it  possesses  such  a  unique 
latent  attribute.  The  reader  should  not  fail  to  recall  here 
Hume's  recognition  of  the  "secret  powers"  of  substances. 

But  is  it  not  possible  that  physico-chemical  and  physi- 
ological knowledge  of  oxygen  and  air,  the  "breath  of  life," 
do  contain  somewhat  more  to  justify  the  supposition  than  is 
usually  recognized?  In  this  connection  I  relate  that  one  of 
the  most  mentally  adhesive  statements  I  ever  heard  from  a 
bio-chemist,  its  adhesiveness  depending  largely  on  the  fact 
that  the  chemist  was  one  of  great  experience  as  a  laboratory 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  85 

investigator,  was  to  the  effect  that  chemical  analyses  make 
known  what  they  find  and  absolutely  no  more.  In  other 
words  such  analyses  never  exclude  the  possibility  of  sub- 
stances other  than  those  found.  And  this  chemist  asserted 
furthermore  that  all  organic  analyses  leave  residues  to  some 
extent.  No  manipulative  methods  are  known,  it  appears, 
capable  of  effecting  a  really  complete  analysis  of  any  or- 
ganic substance.  Whether  these  restrictions  on  analyses 
still  hold  I  am  not  sure,  though  I  have  seen  or  heard  nothing 
which  leads  me  to  suppose  they  do  not. 

It  is  this  general  shadow  of  manipulative  imperfection 
which  overhangs  all  formal  physics  and  chemistry,  coupled 
with  the  advances  being  made  from  time  to  time  in  our 
knowledge  of  oxygen  and  air  which  has  led  me  to  put  into  my 
hypothesis  a  shade  of  doubt  as  to  whether  oxygen  is  the  con- 
stituent of  the  air  the  reaction  of  which  with  the  organism 
produces  consciousness.  The  demonstration  of  helium  and 
argon,  and  probably  neon,  crypton,  and  xenon  in  atmos- 
pheric air,  all  within  a  little  more  than  two  decades,  has 
influenced  my  thinking  in  the  same  direction.  Besides,  the 
idea,  become  a  commonplace  of  physics  and  chemistry  in  a 
single  night,  figuratively  speaking,  that  the  "atom  is  as  com- 
plex as  the  solar  system"  has  had  its  part  in  shaping  my 
conceptions ;  as  have  also  such  well-credentialed  conceptions 
from  the  inorganic  sciences  as  that  "Uranium  II"  is  "a  long- 
lived  element"  which  is  the  "parent  of  the  actinium  series  of 
elements,  but  has  no  genetic  connection  with  the  uranium 
series";  and  that  "in  the  lead  pleiad  there  are  seven  ele- 
ments" having  quite  different  atomic  weights."  28 

The  extent  to  which,  as  exemplified  by  this  case,  the  inor- 
ganic sciences  have  found  themselves  driven  into  the  organic 
realm  for  terms  with  which  to  express  their  new  conceptions 
must  impress  every  thoughtful  person.  Earlier,  what  we 
might  describe  as  purely  contemporaneous  physical  dynamics 
had  to  borrow  such  terms  as  energy,  power,  force,  work, 


86  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

from  the  nomenclature  of  living  beings.  Later,  with  the  per- 
meation of  all  knowledge  by  the  conception  of  the  natural 
or  derivative  origin  of  everything  (a  genuinely  organic  con- 
ception, notice),  has  come  even  for  elementary  chemical  sub- 
stances, the  induction  into  physics  and  chemistry  of  such 
ideas  as  genetic  relations,  parenthood,  and  length  of  life. 
So  my  suggestion  that  the  air  we  breathe  must  be  recognized 
to  possess  latent  attributes  which  by  reacting  with  the  or- 
ganism produce  consciousness,  falls  into  a  genetic  series  in 
the  history  of  the  interpretation  of  nature. 

The  very  important  question,  as  already  indicated,  of  ex- 
actly how  atmospheric  or  molecular  oxygen  operates  in  the 
living  being  generally  and  the  conscious  being  particularly, 
is  largely  for  the  future  to  answer.  One  should  never  fail, 
however,  to  couple  this  question  with  the  same  question  as  to 
the  behavior  of  oxygen,  and  for  that  matter  of  any  other 
chemical  substance,  in  any  reaction  whatever.  Exactly  how, 
for  example,  does  oxygen  operate  with  hydrogen  to  produce 
the  attribute  of  ref rangibility  of  water ;  or  with  phosphorus 
to  produce  the  peculiar  glow  which  that  substance  may  ex- 
hibit under  some  conditions? 

Concerning  the  positive  knowledge  and  the  views  as  to 
details  of  the  action  of  oxygen  in  connection  with  the  or- 
ganism, only  a  little  can  be  said  here  though  that  little  may 
be  very  important.  Looked  at  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
old,  the  orthodoxly  atomistic  chemistry,  probably  the  most 
anomalous  thing  about  my  hypothesis  is  that  the  organism 
conceived  as  equivalent,  chemically  speaking,  to  an  elemen- 
tary substance,  is  the  unquestioned  fact  that  the  organism  is 
not  only  composed  of  several  chemical  substances,  but  that 
one  of  these  is  oxygen  itself.  Stated  baldly,  the  anomaly  is 
that  two  chemical  substances  are  supposed  to  react  upon  each 
other,  one  of  which  (the  organism)  is  known  not  only  not 
to  be  simple,  but  to  contain  the  other  substance.  But  even 
the  old  chemistry  with  its  "compound  radicals,"  of  which 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  87 

cyanogen  (CN)2  is  said  to  have  been  the  first  discovered,  and 
of  which  the  unitedly-acting  combinations  of  carbon  and 
hydrogen  as  methyl,  CH33  affords  some  slight  support  for 
our  conception  so  far  as  the  mere  matter  of  chemically  uni- 
tary compoundedness  is  concerned.  In  so  far,  however,  as 
technical  chemistry  can  be  drawn  upon  for  supporting  our 
hypothesis,  it  is  the  new,  or  physical  chemistry,  as  has 
been  repeatedly  stated,  that  is  our  main  reliance.  Unless  I 
am  greatly  deceived,  the  real  inwardness  of  that  great  move- 
ment in  inorganic  science  is  against  the  age-old  conception  of 
the  ultimate  adequacy  of  atoms  to  explain  inorganic  na- 
ture, almost  as  positively  as  the  organismal  conception  is 
against  the  ultimate  adequacy  of  any  constituent  element 
whatever,  to  explain  organic  nature.  The  surface  energies, 
for  example,  developed  at  contact  faces  and  giving  rise  to 
the  phenomena  of  adsorption  *  appear  to  be  not  a  whit  less 
real  and  ultimate  energies  than  are  any  that  can  be  attrib- 
uted to  atoms  and  molecules  taken  as  such.  And,  be  it  no- 
ticed, one  of  the  most  distinctive  things  about  these  areal  and 
massive  energies  is  that  they  dominate  atomic  and  molecular 
energies  to  a  certain  extent.  This  is  just  what  the  now  uni- 
versally recognized  principle  of  "mass  action"  is  in  so  far  as 
such  action  has  been  studied  enough  to  make  possible  its  for- 
mulation into  law;  that  is  enough  to  learn  how  it  influences 
velocity  and  quantity  of  chemical  change.  But  would  any 
careful  physicist  or  chemist  pretend  to  know  to  a  certainty 
that  such  action  is  restricted  to  influence  of  that  sort?  Surely 
not.  Are  we  certain  for  instance  that  it  can  not  under  any 

*  Adsorption  is  the  loading  of  the  surface  of  a  solid  body  immersed  in 
a  solution,  with  the  dissolved  substance.  Thus  it  is  by  adsorption  that 
charcoal  takes  the  coloring  matter  out  of  a  colored  solution.  The  action 
results  from  the  facts  that  there  is  surface  tension  at  the  interfaces  be- 
tween the  charcoal  and  the  liquid,  and  that  this  tension  is  lessened  by 
the  presence  of  the  dissolved  color-substance  in  the  liquid.  The  sub- 
stance then  moves  to  the  place  of  lessened  tension  and  concentrates  on 
the  surface  of  the  solid.29  The  principle  has  very  wide  application  in 
nature,  particularly  in  organic  nature,  where  colloidal  substances  and 
water  are  in  contact  so  extensively. 


88  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

circumstances  influence  qualitative  as  well  as  quantitative 
change?  Surely  we  are  not.  This  of  course  is  far  from 
contending  that  mass  action  actually  does  influence  quali- 
ties. My  sole  point  is  that  so  long  as  there  is  lack  of 
certainty  that  it  does  not  or  may  not  exert  such  influence 
any  assumption  which  implies  such  certainty  is  unwarranted 
and  unscientific. 

Putting  together,  then,  the  physically  massive  concep- 
tions of  inorganic  chemistry  and  the  organismal  conceptions 
of  bio-chemistry  what  seems  to  follow  touching  the  chemico- 
substantive  composition  of  organisms  is  that  a  portion  of 
all  the  substances  essential  to  life,  carbon,  oxygen  and  others, 
have  been  combined  from  all  eternity  (whatever  be  the  mean- 
ing of  the  phrase)  in  the  peculiar  way  called  organic,  while 
other  portions  have  remained  in  the  state  called  inorganic. 
This  leads  me  to  remark,  quite  incidentally  so  far  as  this 
discussion  is  concerned,  that  according  to  this  view  the  as- 
sumption would  be  that  organisms  have  always  existed,  or  at 
least  that  they  have  existed  as  long  as  "matter"  or  anything 
else  of  which  we  have  any  information  or  clear  conception, 
has  existed.  The  warrantableness  of  this  assumption  I  am  re- 
lieved from  arguing  here  from  having  treated  the  problem 
at  some  length  in  another  place.  (Are  we  obliged  to  suppose 
the  spontaneous  generation  of  life  ever  occurred?)^  All 
that  need  be  said  now  about  the  outcome  of  that  discussion  is 
that  the  warrantableness  lies  in  the  absence  of  any  ground 
for  assuming  the  contrary.  I  take  my  position  squarely  on 
the  direct  evidence  in  the  case.  All  the  evidence  of  that  sort 
we  have — and  in  that  discussion  I  emphasize  the  fact  of  its 
vast  quantity — is  to  the  effect  that  organisms  are  produced 
by  other  organisms  known  as  parents  and  in  no  other  way.* 

*  To  the  stock  and  rather  vapid  rejoinder  that  such  a  solution  of  the 
problem  of  the  origin  of  life  is  no  solution  at  all,  but  only  a  putting  oif  of 
the  difficulty,  the  obvious  reply  from  my  standpoint  is  that  I  am  making 
no  pretense  of  "solving  the  problem,"  as  "solution"  would  be  meant  in 
the  anticipated  rejoinder.  From  my  standpoint,  however,  the  everlast- 
ingly-from-parents  hypothesis  would  be  a  solution  of  the  problem  if  the 
hypothesis  were  proved  true. 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  89 

We  can  now  state  briefly  as  much  more  of  the  bio-chemical 
aspect  of  the  problem  as  seems  indispensable  to  our  present 
argument.  A  few  remarks  on  what  the  physiology  of  our  day 
often  calls  tissue  respiration  will  compass  what  is  in  mind. 
The  key  fact  in  this  is  of  two- fold  character:  (1)  The  tissues 
of  the  organism,  not  its  blood  or  any  other  fluids,  contain  the 
substance  which  is  in  the  strictest  sense  living.  (£)  This 
substance  is  called  living  because  chemical  changes  of  a  very 
distinctive  sort  are  going  on  in  it.  These  changes  are  of  a 
fundamentally  double  nature  as  regards  atmospheric  or 
molecular  oxygen;  namely,  combinative  and  incorporative 
change,  and  separative  and  expulsive  change.  The  last-men- 
tioned, the  separative  and  expulsive  change,  is  known  as  oxi- 
dation and  manifests  itself  to  ordinary  experience  in  the  dis- 
charge of  oxygen  combined  with  carbon  as  carbon  dioxide, 
and  in  the  setting  free  of  energy  in  the  form  of  muscular  and 
other  work,  and  of  heat.  The  first-mentioned,  or  incorpora- 
tive change,  consists  in  taking  in  and  storing  up  oxygen, 
"somehow,"  as  the  more  carefully  worded  physiologies  put 
it.  This  statement  may  be  taken  as  a  very  brief  natural 
history  description  of  the  most  fundamental  steps  in  what 
formal  physiology  calls  metabolism  with  its  two  aspects,  the 
constructive,  or  anabolic,  and  the  destructive,  or  katabolic. 
Probably  no  one  will  question  that  this  conception  of  the 
foundations  of  the  life  process  for  nearly,  if  not  quite,  all 
animal  life  is  that  held  by  the  best  physiologists  since  the 
time  of  C.  Bernard  at  least.  No  physiologist  whom  I  have 
consulted  has  stated  the  nature  of  the  process  more  definitely 
than  has  Sir  Michael  Foster.  "The  Respiration,"  he  writes, 
"of  the  muscle  then  does  not  consist  in  throwing  into  the 
blood  oxidizable  substances,  there  to  be  oxidized  into  car- 
bonic acid  and  other  matters ;  but  it  does  consist  in  the  as- 
sumption and  storing  up  of  oxygen  somehow  or  other  in  its 
substance,  in  the  building  up  by  help  of  that  oxygen  of 
explosive  decomposable  substances,  and  in  the  carrying  out 


90  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

of  decompositions  whereby  carbonic  acid  and  other  matters 
are  discharged  first  into  the  substance  of  the  muscle  and 
subsequently  into  the  blood."  31  And  he  points  out  in  other 
connections  that  what  is  true  of  muscle  in  this  regard  is  es- 
sentially true  of  all  other  tissue  systems.  In  another  still 
more  recent  text  book  we  read:  "Nothing  definite  is  known, 
however,  as  to  the  nature  of  the  probable  combinations 
formed  by  oxygen  with  the  different  materials  for  building 
up  muscles  and  other  tissues,  or  of  the  intermediate  anabolic 
and  katabolic  forms  through  which  it  passes  in  combining 
with  carbon  into  carbonic  acid."  32  And  this  author  then 
expresses  what  are,  apparently,  his  own  views,  by  quoting 
from  Foster  as  follows :  "The  whole  mystery  of  life  lies  hid- 
den in  the  story  of  that  progress  [that  of  construction  and 
destruction  in  the  tissues]  and  for  the  present  we  must  be 
content  with  simply  knowing  the  beginning  and  the  end." 

The  kernel  of  my  suggestion  so  far  as  metabolism  is  con- 
cerned, is  that  the  anabolic,  or  the  assimilative,  the  truly 
synthetic  aspect  of  the  complete  operation,  is  the  continual 
renewal,  or  keeping  up  of  the  oxygen  constituent  of  the 
organism  which  comes  to  it  by  heredity,  that  is  which  has 
always  been  in  the  "line  of  descent."  It  is  the  maintenance 
of  what  might  be  spoken  of  as  the  original  oxygen  constitu- 
ent of  the  organism.  There  would  always  then  be  operating 
in  the  organism  oxygen  of  two  sources,  that  from  the  one 
source  designated,  employing  our  well-established  evolutional 
terminology,  phylogenic  or  hereditary  oxygen ;  and  the  other 
ontogenic  or  individual  oxygen.  In  general  the  same  kind 
of  reasoning  would  hold  for  the  other  chemical  simples,  car- 
bon, nitrogen,  and  so  on;  but  these  are  in  quite  a  different 
status  from  oxygen  owing  to  the  fact  that  they  are  not 
normally  taken  by  the  animal  organism  in  the  pure  or  uncom- 
bined  state,  but  only  in  some  other  organic  combination, 
as  food  in  the  ordinary  sense. 

Metabolically  expressed,  then,  we  may  say  in  short  that 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  91 

the  warrantableness  for  considering  the  individual  organism 
as  a  chemical  element,  is  the  fact  that  it  maintains  its  identity 
as  regards  all  its  elementary  constituents  except  one,  oxygen, 
by  wrenching  these,  so  to  speak,  from  other  organic  com- 
pounds (by  digesting  these)  and  then  by  synthesizing  the 
elements  into  its  own  particular  substance.  Another  way  of 
expressing  the  same  conception  is  to  say  that  the  organism 
is  an  element,  chemically  speaking,  because  it  reacts  directly 
in  a  chemical  sense  with  another  element. 

Did  this  chapter  pretend  to  be  anything  more  than  a 
sketch  of  a  theory  of  consciousness  a  considerable  discus- 
sion of  the  "activation"  of  oxygen  would  naturally  come  in 
somewhere,  perhaps  at  this  point.  The  essense  of  activation 
is  the  fact  that  when  oxygen  passes  into  the  organism  by  the 
respiratory  process  it  is  somehow  changed  into  a  condition 
which  enables  it  to  oxidize  living  tissue-substances  as  it 
can  not  to  any  degree,  seemingly,  when  brought  into  con- 
tact with  the  same  substances  outside  the  organism.  This 
discussion  would  involve  the  various  theories  which  have 
been  put  forward  to  account  for  this  phenomenon,  as  those 
which  make  use  of  the  principle  of  enzymes,  of  peroxides  or 
of  some  other.  All  that  our  aims  here  require  us  to  notice 
is  that  nothing  conclusive  as  touching  the  nature  of  activa- 
tion would  come  from  the  discussion.  How  unsatisfactory 
a  state  this  whole  subject  is  in  may  be  seen  from  the  follow- 
ing words  of  a  foremost  American  biochemist:  "It  has  been 
a  popular  practice  to  appeal  to  hypothetical  enzymes  to 
explain  some  of  the  obscure  chemical  transformations  in  the 
organism.  Thus  we  have  been  wandering  through  the  mazes 
of  the  oxidases,  oxygenases,  peroxidases,  reductases,  cata- 
lases  and  other  products  of  perplexing  nomenclature  in  the 
hope  of  escaping  the  uncertainties  of  intermediary  meta- 
bolism." 33 


92  An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 

Summed-up  Statement  of  Justification  of  the  Hypothesis 

The  final  gathering-up-and-putting-together  may  now  be 
made  of  all  that  has  been  said  about  the  physico-chemical 
aspect  of  the  organism  on  the  one  hand,  and  about  its  psy- 
chical aspect  on  the  other.  That  is  to  say,  we  are  now  ready 
to  epitomize  the  results  of  our  examination  of  the  ancient 
and  honorable  but  withal  unsolved  problem  of  how  Body  and 
Soul  go  together.  As  regards  "body"  or  "the  physical"  we 
have  been  led  to  the  physico-chemical  conception  of  the  or- 
ganism as  a  well-nigh  inconceivably  complex  mass  of  sub- 
stances, mostly  in  the  colloidal  state,  operating  as  a  system 
of  phases  in  dynamic  or  constantly  changing  equilibrium. 
As  regards  "soul"  or  "the  psychical,"  we  have  found  also  a 
series  of  phases  of  activities,  namely  the  phases  of  intellect 
and  reason,  those  of  instinct,  those  of  feeling  and  emotion, 
those  of  the  will,  those  of  the  tropisms  and  the  "simple  re- 
flexes," and  finally  those  of  simple  protoplasmic  response. 
According  to  my  hypothesis,  the  phases  of  the  bio-chemico- 
physical  sort  and  the  phases  of  the  psychical  sort  have  com- 
mon ground  in  the  organism  as  a  whole,  the  phases  of  in- 
tellect and  reason  corresponding  to  the  cerebro-spinal  nerv- 
ous system ;  the  phase  of  instinct  corresponding  probably  to 
the  autonomic  nervous  system ;  the  phases  of  feeling  and  emo- 
tion corresponding  mainly  to  the  glandular  and  visceral  sys- 
tems; those  of  the  will  to  the  body-muscular  system;  those 
of  the  tropisms  and  simple  reflexes  to  the  receptor-conductor- 
effector  systems ;  and  finally  those  of  simple  protoplasmic 
response  to  the  fundamental  protoplasmic  mechanism  of 
response,  whatever  its  structure. 

According  to  the  scheme  presented  in  the  sketch  and 
summed  up  here,  just  as  physical  functioning  and  physical 
form  reach  back  to  the  very  dawning  of  animal  life,  both  in 
the  individual  and  in  the  race  or  type,  so  consciousness  with 
its  nether  limits  in  what,  following  the  terminology  of  em- 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness  93 

bryology  (see  section  on  the  pro-morphology  of  the  egg- 
cell.  Chap.  8  The  Unity  of  the  Organism),  might  be  called 
pro-consciousness,  is  an  attribute  of  all  animal  organisms. 
As  comparative  anatomy  and  physiology  have  made  us 
familiar  with  the  physical  aspect  of  the  animal  organism 
existing  as  the  fully  realized  or  developed  adult  at  one 
end  of  the  ontogenic  series,  and  as  the  unrealized  adult 
or  germ  at  the  other  end  of  the  same  series,  exactly  so 
is  psychology  gradually  familiarizing  us  with  the  real- 
ized, or  adult  mind  at  one  end  of  the  ontogenic  series, 
and  as  the  unrealized  or  germinal  mind  at  the  other  end 
of  the  same  series.  When  we  affirm  that  the  completed 
individual  organism  is  latent  in  the  germ,  we  must  under- 
stand that  the  psychical  aspect  no  less  than  the  physical 
aspect  is  so  latent.  With  very  little  doubt,  it  seems  to  me, 
the  real  meaning  of  the  so-called  subconscious,  and  of 
psycho-analysis  as  a  method  of  investigating  it,  is  that  the 
ontogenic  stages  of  the  psychic  life  of  the  human  organism 
are  being  discovered  and  that  a  method  of  investigating  these 
stages  is  being  worked  out.  Freud  and  his  followers  have 
been  and  still  are  somewhat  in  the  dark,  I  think,  as  to  just 
what  they  are  doing,  albeit  their  discoveries  and  methods  are 
of  the  utmost  importance. 

REFERENCE  INDEX 

1.  Ants,  p.  519,  by  W.  M.  Wheel-  cartes    (Open  Court  Edition). 

er   (Columbia  University  Bio-      7.  Consciousness    a    form    of    En- 
logical   series,   Vol.   9).  ergy,  p.   120,  by  W.   P.  Mon- 

2.  A  short  History  of  Science,  p.  tague    (in    Essays    Philosophi- 

262,  by  W.   T.   Sedgwick   and  cal  and  Psychological  in  Hon- 

H.  W.  Taylor.  or  of  Wm.   James). 

3.  Outlines    of    Psychology,    p.    2,      8.  An  Enquiry  Concerning  Human 

by  J.   Royce.  Understanding,    Sec.    IV,   prt. 

4.  Critical   Realism,   p.    75,   by   R.  1,    by    David    Hume     (Open 

W.  Sellars.  Court   Edition). 

5.  Outlines    of    Psychology,    p    3,      9.  The    Probable    Infinity   of    Na- 

by  J.   Royce.  ture  and  Life,  by  Wm.  E.  Rit- 

6.  The    Principles    of    Philosophy,  ter. 

prt.   1,  sec  8,  by   Ren<§  Des-      10.  Hume  with  Helps  to  the  Study 


An  Organismal  Theory  of  Consciousness 


of  Berkeley,  p.  98,  by  T.  H. 
Huxley     (authorized    edition). 

11.  Ibid.,  p.  96. 

12.  Ibid.,  p.  100. 

13.  Things  and  Sensations,  p.  680, 

by  G.  F.  Stout  (Proc.  British 
Acad.,  1905-6). 

14.  Creative   Intelligence,  p.  9,  by 
John  Dewey. 

15.  The  Principles  of  Psychology, 

I,  p.  341,  by  Wm.  James. 

16.  Ants,     p.     521,     by     W.     M. 
Wheeler. 

17.  Animal    Behavior    p.    310,    by 
C.  O.  Whitman   (Woods  Hole 
Biological    Lectures,    1898). 

18.  The  Principles  of  Psychology, 

II,  p.  451,  by  Wm.  James. 

19.  Bodily  Changes  in  Pain,  Hun- 

ger,  Fear   and   Rage,   p.   282, 
by  W.  B.  Cannon. 

20.  The  Principles  of  Psychology, 

II,  p.  450,  by  Wm.  James. 

21.  Ibid.,   p.   451. 

22.  The  Dynamic  Side  of  Biochem- 

istry, p.  217,  by  F.  G.   Hop- 
kins.    Nature,  vol.  92. 

23.  Ibid.,  p.  220. 


24.  Ibid.,   p.   220. 

25.  Animal  Behavior,  p.  256,  by  C. 
Lloyd   Morgan. 

26.  Critical  Realism,  p.  75,  by  R. 
W.   Sellars. 

27.  Elementary  Principles  of  Sta- 

tistical Mechanics,  pref.  p.  x, 
by  J.  W.   Gibbs. 

28.  Identity    of    Atomic    Weights 
among  Different  Elements,  p. 
442,  by  G.  L.  Wendt,  Science, 
Vol.  47. 

29.  A   System   of  Physical  Chem- 

istry, II,  p.  303,  by  Wm.   C. 
McC.    Lewis. 

30.  The   Probable  Infinity  of  Na- 
ture and  Life,  first  essay,  by 
Wm.    E.    Ritter. 

31.  A  Text-book  of  Physiology,  p. 

469,   by   Michael   Foster. 

32.  Human   Physiology,   I,  p.   395, 
by    Luigi   Luciani    (trans,    by 
Welby). 

33.  Oxidations    and   Reductions   in 
the  Animal  Body,  p.  21,  by  L. 
B.    Mendel,    Science,   Vol.   37, 
1913. 


POSTSCRIPT 

(To  "The  Unity  of  the  Organism") 

THE  argument  in  favor  of  the  organismal  way  of  viewing 
living  nature  has  now  run  what  appears  to  me  its  natural 
course,  to  its  inevitable  end.  Yet  I  cannot  bring  myself  to 
write  "Finis"  without  making  a  few  remarks  which  though 
connected  vitally  with  the  argument,  do  not  seem  an  essential 
part  of  it. 

These  remarks  concern  the  general  effect  of  the  organismal 
standpoint  on  those  who  may  grasp  it  firmly  and  adopt  it 
unreservedly.  Since,  as  pointed  out  in  the  "Historic  Back- 
ground" with  which  this  book  opens,  the  standpoint  has  been 
recognized  by  biologists  with  varying  degrees  of  fullness 
from  the  time  of  Aristotle  at  least,  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  the  human  mind  is  naturally  attuned,  as  one  might  say, 
to  this  general  type  of  response  to  organic  phenomena.  It 
seems  therefore  fitting  that  a  presentation  like  that  which  I 
have  made  should  be  accompanied  by  a  few  words  on  the 
probable  influence  of  a  wide  prevalence  of  the  organismal 
view.  The  pertinent  question  will  be  asked,  how  could  it 
have  come  to  pass  that  if  the  standpoint  has  been  so  long 
in  the  world  it  should  have  missed  full  recognition  and  have 
failed  to  exert  its  due  influence?  The  reply  is  obvious  to  an 
attentive  reader  of  this  book:  At  no  time  until  the  present 
in  the  long  historical  growth  of  knowledge  of  the  living  world 
has  information  been  sufficient  to  make  possible  a  rounded- 
out  statement  of  the  conception.  To  illustrate,  it  is  only  in 
the  very  last  years  that  enough  has  been  known  of  the 
physical  chemistry  of  the  cell  to  engender  such  an  interpre- 
tation of  this  exceedingly  important  biological  entity  as  that 
which  biochemists  are  just  now  reaching.  Yet  this  interpre- 

95 


96  Postscript 

tation  is  indispensable  to  anything  even  approaching  a  full 
development  of  the  organismal  view. 

But  nothing  stands  out  more  boldly  from  the  pages  of 
this  book  than  the  insufficiency  even  yet,  of  actual  knowledge 
for  making  the  standpoint  complete.  If  therefore,  I  append 
to  my  presentation  a  brief  reference  to  the  larger  effect  the 
view  has  had  on  myself,  and  on  this  basis  forecast  what  the 
effect  would  be  on  thinking  people  generally  were  they  to 
make  it  their  own,  such  a  forecast  will  surely  be  in  harmony 
with  the  larger  purpose  of  the  book,  even  though  the  antici- 
patory remarks  have  no  place  in  the  presentation  itself. 

The  long  and  laborious  gathering  and  arranging  of  facts, 
and  weighing  of  natural  evidence  and  formal  arguments 
which  has  constituted  the  development  of  the  standpoint  in 
my  own  mind,  has  compelled  me  to  re-examine  and  re-assess 
the  whole  frame  and  fabric  of  my  spiritual  life.  Nothing,  so 
far  as  I  can  tell,  has  escaped.  Not  my  scientific  knowledge 
alone — my  professional  stock-in-trade — but  all  my  ideas  and 
beliefs  touching  religion,  art,  society,  politics,  industry,  per- 
sonal relations,  and  private  living,  have  come  in  for  their 
share  of  scrutiny  and  renovation. 

An  exceedingly  brief  "synoptic"  classification  and  char- 
acterization *  of  the  entire  range  of  these  effects  can  be 
given  in  the  terms  of  formal  science  and  philosophy. 

As  to  classification,  the  effects  fall  into  a  two-fold  group- 
ing. One  of  the  groups  appertains  to  the  great  province  of 
the  nature  of  knowledge ;  the  other  to  the  equally  great 
province  of  the  nature  of  morals. 

The  characterization  of  effects  on  the  nature  of  knowl- 
edge which  seems  to  me  most  inclusive  and  most  practically 
significant,  may  be  stated  thus :  By  the  validation  of  ob- 
jective knowledge,  largely  through  the  principle  of  what  I 
have  called  standardization  of  reality,  but  partly  through 

*  See  my  essay,  The  Place  of  Description,  Definition  and  Classifica- 
tion (Hitter,  1918). 


Postscript  97 

the  organismal  hypothesis  of  consciousness,  such  knowl- 
edge is  elevated  to  the  rank  of  strict  equality  with  "pure 
thought,"  often  so-called;  that  is,  with  subjective  knowl- 
edge. In  this  way  mathematico-mechanistic  science  is  de- 
prived of  the  regal  place  it  has  claimed  for  itself  since  the 
era  of  Descartes  and  Leibnitz,  and  is  brought  to  the  plane 
of  absolute  equality  as  to  importance  and  dignity,  with 
sense-experiential  science.  By  thus  adjusting  the  claims  of 
these  two  great  realisms  of  science,  an  attitude  toward  the 
infinite  totality  of  nature,  and  a  methodology  for  interpret- 
ing it,  which  have  hitherto  borne  the  stamp  of  subjection 
and  inferiority  assume  their  rightful  places  in  the  great 
hierarchy  of  philosophical  science.  This  leveling-down  of 
mathematical  mechanics  and  the  deductive  method  and  level- 
ing-up  of  observational  knowledge  and  the  inductive  method, 
implies  the  complete  overthrow  of  psycho-physical  dualism 
in  psychology,  and  the  rescue  of  personality  from  bondage 
to  a  theoretically  infinite  monotony  of  "Matter  and  Energy." 

The  characterization  of  the  effects  of  the  organismal  view 
on  morals  centers  around  the  perception  that  in  the  establish- 
ment of  human  personality  the  persons  are  organically  in- 
terdependent upon  one  another;  that  is,  interdependent 
through  their  "attributes  of  relation,"  this  resulting  in  the 
incorporation  of  men  into  a  pluralistic  universe  far  more 
real  and  vital  than  philosophic  pluralism  has  hitherto  been 
in  position  to  grasp.  Through  a  type  of  human  conduct 
guided  by  knowledge  of  these  principles  of  personality  and 
the  interdependence  of  personalities,  and  through  supple- 
menting mathematico-mechanistic  methods  of  study  by  a 
rigid  application  of  observational  and  statistical  methods,  a 
genuine  science  of  morals,  both  theoretical  and  practical, 
is  made  attainable. 

That  my  enterprise  of  developing  the  organismal  view  is 
only  part  and  parcel  of  the  general  current  of  interpretation 
of  living  nature  which  has  flowed  through  the  centuries  seems 


98  Postscript 

clear  even  from  my  meager  acquaintance  with  the  history  of 
philosophic  thought.  Thus  we  read  in  Windelband  (A  His- 
tory of  Philosophy,  Eng.  by  Tufts,)  :  "For  the  decisive  fac- 
tor in  the  philosophical  movement  of  the  nineteenth  century 
is  doubtless  the  question  as  to  the  degree  of  importance 
which  the  natural-science  conception  of  phenomena  may 
claim  for  our  view  of  the  world  and  life  as  a  whole."  (624). 
Then  after  speaking  of  the  sharp  antithesis  between  the 
Weltanschauung  elaborated  by  the  "Highly  strained  idealism 
of  the  German  Philosophy"  of  the  early  nineteenth  century, 
and  the  "materialistic  Weltanschauung"  of  the  later  decades 
of  the  same  century,  the  author  writes :  "If  we  are  to  bring 
out  from  the  philosophical  literature  of  this  century  and 
emphasize  those  movements  in  which  the  above  characteristic 
antithesis  has  found  its  most  important  manifestation,  we 
have  to  do  primarily  with  the  question,  in  what  sense  the 
psychical  life  can  be  subjected  to  the  natural-science  mode 
of  cognition."  (p.  625). 

That  Part  II  of  this  book  of  mine,  especially  Chaps.  20 
to  24,  go  a  long  way  toward  answering  the  cardinal  question 
formulated  by  Windelband  appears  to  me  certain.  And,  I 
may  add,  it  also  seems  quite  clear  to  me  that  the  gigantic 
struggle  at  arms  which  that  philosopher's  nation  has  now 
brought  upon  the  world,  is  one  of  the  strongest  proofs  that 
philosophic  thought  and,  following  this,  social  and  political 
leadership  in  Germany  have  failed  miserably  to  discover  the 
Via  Media  between  the  Weltanschauung  of  the  "highly 
strained  idealism  of  the  German  Philosophy"  and  the  mate- 
rialistic Weltanschauung  which  has  finally  reached  its  nat- 
ural climax  in  militaristic  brutism,  and  is  almost  certainly 
(Sept.,  1918)  approaching  its  overthrow. 

Nothing  could  more  fittingly  end  this  book,  devoted  as  it 
is  to  demonstrating  the  operative  nature  of  organic  unity 
in  one  of  its  great  segments,  than  a  reference  to  the  fact 
that  the  philosophy  of  life  now  determining  German  morals, 


Postscript  99 

and  which  has  drawn  its  inspiration  largely  from  the  hypo- 
thesis of  natural  selection,  has  failed — pathetically  beyond 
the  power  of  words  to  express  if  done  unintentionally;  and 
criminally  in  equal  measure  if  done  intentionally — to  under- 
stand the  real  meaning  of  Darwin's  teaching  as  a  whole. 

Certain  it  is  that  had  the  German  philosophers  of  Macht- 
politik  recognized  the  place  of  unqualified  supremacy  as- 
cribed by  Darwin  to  the  mental  and  moral  endowments  of 
man,  it  would  have  been  impossible  for  them  to  make  the 
dogma  of  survival  of  the  fittest  serve  their  ends  in  any  such 
way  as  they  have  made  it,  and  done  so  honestly.  Attentive 
reading  of  The  Descent  of  Man  makes  it  perfectly  plain 
that  Darwin  simply  accepted  all  the  higher  human  attri- 
butes— moral,  esthetic,  and  religious,  no  less  than  those  of 
the  intellect — as  fundamental  data  in  his  reasoning  about 
man's  evolution.  His  sole  effort  as  touching  these  was  merely 
to  see  in  how  far  they  could  be  regarded  either  as  helped 
forward  in  their  development  by  natural  selection,  or  at  least 
as  not  inconsistent  witlTit.  Apparently  it  never  even  oc- 
curred to  him  to  regard  his  hypothesis  as  supreme-over-all, 
so  that  all  attributes  whatever,  the  noblest  ones  of  man  with 
the  rest,  must  either  be  forced  into  conformity  with  it,  or 
their  reality  and  power  virtually  denied.  "I  fully  subscribe 
to  the  judgment,"  runs  the  opening  sentence  of  the  chapter 
on  "The  Moral  Sense,"  etc.,  "of  those  writers  who  maintain 
that,  of  all  the  differences  between  man  and  the  lower  ani- 
mals, the  moral  sense  or  conscience  is  by  far  the  most  im- 
portant." And,  especially  significant  at  this  time,  Darwin 
quotes  with  obvious  approval,  an  apostrophe  to  Duty  by 
Kant,  in  which  this  "Wondrous  thought"  is  represented  as 
"holding  up  its  naked  law"  in  the  soul,  and  demanding 
reverence.  Darwin's  entire  discussion  in  this  part  of  the 
Descent  makes  it  clear  that  what  he  had  in  mind  was  to 
discover  as  far  as  possible  the  germs  of  "conscience,"  of 
"feeling  of  right  and  wrong,"  of  an  "inward  monitor,"  of 


100  Postscript 

"sympathy,"  of  "parental  and  filial  affection,"  of  "social 
affection,"  of  the  "instinct  of  self-sacrifice"  and  so  on,  in  the 
lower  animals  so  as  to  have  a  starting  point  for  these  attri- 
butes as  they  occur  in  civilized  man.  It  was  not  at  all  his 
purpose  to  show,  as  the  German  perversion  of  the  struggle- 
and-survival  hypothesis  holds,  that  the  evolution  of  man 
has  consisted  largely  in  a  farther  differentiation  and  intensi- 
fication of  the  dominantly  brute  attributes,  with  an  infusion 
as  a  kind  of  by-product  from  the  struggle  for  existence,  of 
certain  "humanistic  sentimentalities,"  which  in  reality  are 
signs  of  weakness  and  must  be  suppressed.* 

And  this  perversion  by  German  science  and  philosophy  of 
Darwin's  teaching  is  rooted  very  deep  in  German  culture  and 
character.  The  straightforward,  common-sense  descriptions 
and  inductions  of  the  practical-minded,  country-dwelling, 
country-loving,  unacademic  English  naturalist  were  alto- 
gether too  simple  and  unsophisticated  to  satisfy  a  Kultur 
permeated  through  and  through  with  the  "highly  strained 
idealism"  of  Kant,  Fichte,  Hegel,  and  Schopenhauer.  The 
two  worst  errors  committed  by  Darwin  were  his  over-em- 
phasis on  the  natural  selection  hypothesis,  and  his  pro- 
pounding of  the  gemmule-pangenesis  hypothesis ;  and  it  is 
highly  characteristic  that  it  was  in  just  these  two  "strained" 
speculations  that  German  biology  and  practical  philosophy 
should  have  taken  up  Darwinism  the  most  ardently  and  over- 
worked it  the  most  absurdly  and  disastrously. 

My  examination  of  the  germplasm-determinant  theory  of 
Weismann  in  Part  I  of  this  book  has  revealed  something  of 
the  scope  and  nature  which  the  gemmule  fallacy  was  destined 
to  assume  when  it  fell  subject  to  German  speculation.  The 
more  subtle  and  far-reaching  and  humanly  practical  conse- 
quences of  the  adoption  and  elaboration  of  the  struggle-and- 

*The  effort  which  Dr.  George  Nasmyth  has  made  in  his  book  Social 
Progress  and  the  Darwinian  Theory  to  set  right  Darwin's  position  in 
this  matter,  ought  to  bear  fruit  after  a  while. 


Postscript  101 

survival  hypothesis  by  German  speculation  has  not  yet  been 
subjected  to  thorough-going  biological  criticism,  though  sev- 
eral moves  in  this  direction  have  been  made. 

Even  the  realism  of  recent  German  political  and  economic 
theory  and  practice  is  a  "highly  strained"  speculative  real- 
ism. This  philosophical  monstrosity  is  largely  attributable, 
demonstrably  so  I  believe,  to  a  cultural  and  governmental 
system  in  which  the  principle  of  universal  organic  personality 
is  grossly  violated.  And  what  a  price  in  misery  and  blood 
and  treasure  the  whole  world,  but  old  Europe  particularly, 
is  paying  for  a  consummation  which  a  truer  philosophy  of 
life  would  have  foreseen  and  forestalled ! 

Can  the  leaders  of  German  Kultur  be  convinced  of  the 
fundamental  fallacy  of  their  theory  of  human  and  national 
life,  only  by  discovering  that  their  military  establishment, 
built  up  through  many  decades  of  patient,  costly  organiza- 
tion and  discipline,  but  under  guidance  of  a  philosophy  of 
mechanism  and  brutism,  is  yet  incapable  of  overpowering  a 
military  establishment,  a  large  portion  of  which  may  be  im- 
provised in  the  course  of  a  few  months,  if  such  improvision 
be  under  guidance  of  a  philosophy  of  personality  and  hu- 
manism? 


INDEX 


Adsorption,   meaning   of,   87 

Air,  in  relation  to  consciousness, 
33;  breath,  and  spirit,  81 

Alchemy,   31 

Analysis,  of  organic  substances, 
85 

Anger,   60 

Animal,  the  human,  27 

Anthropologist,    28 

Ants,  cocoon  spinning  by,  54 

Attitudes,  difference  between  sci- 
entific and  philosophic,  50;  ele- 
ments and  emotions,  64 

Attributes,  ethical,  27;  observed 
corporeal,  32;  physical  and 
chemical,  48;  latent  of  oxygen, 
84;  latent,  86. 

Axioms,  of  mathematics,  40 

Biologist,   anthropological,   78 
Biology,  subdivisions  of,  26 
Body,     constitution     of,     32;     vs. 

corpse     or     cadaver,     65;     and 

soul,    66 

Boyle,  Robert,  31 
Bread,   "secret  powers"   of,  43 
"Breath  of  Life,"  46,  79,  81 

Cannon,  W.  B.,  on  the  autonomic 
nervous  system  and  adrenin  and 
emotions,  61,  66 

Carbon,  81 

Cause,  unknown,  of  Experience, 
46 

Cell,  physical  chemistry  concep- 
tion of,  69 

Chemical,   criterion   of,   32 

Chemistry,  definition  of,  30;  phys- 
ical, 46,  79;  periodic  law  of, 
72;  atomistic,  86. 

Consciousness,  and  chemical  ac- 
tion, 33;  theory  of,  and  theory 
of  knowledge,  39;  lowest  terms 


of,  51;  attribute  of  the  organ- 
ism as  a  whole,  52;  and  physico- 
chemical  conception  of  the  or- 
ganism, 67;  and  pro-conscious- 
ness, 93. 

Descartes,  R.,  and  innate  ideas,  44 
Dewey,   John,   41;    on    "self"    and 

environment,  48 
Dramatist,    60 

Emotion,  and  physical  organiza- 
tion, 59;  James'  conception  of, 
61 

Energy,  and  substance,  80;  and 
power,  force,  work,  85;  surface, 
87 

Essences,  31 

Experience,  subjective  and  objec- 
tive, 28;  unknown  causes  of,  46; 
as  to  nature  of,  48 

Facts,  matters  of,  42 
Forces,  abuse  of  the  term,  41 
Foster,  Sir  Michael,  89 
Freud,  S.,  93 

Oibbs,  J.    W.,  on   constitution   of 

matter,   84 
"Gifts,"   natural,   78 

Helium,  85 

Henderson,  L.  J.,  82 

Higher   usefulness   of   Science,   80 

Hopkins,  F.  G.,  on  life,  cells,  and 

molecules,   69 
Hume,  David,  on  psychic  life  and 

qualities   of  objects,  42 
Huxley,    T.    H.,    on   innate    ideas, 

41;  against  materialism,  45 
Hypothesis,    of    consciousness    29; 

"working,"  34 


103 


104 


Index 


Ideas,  relations  of  in  Hume's  phi- 
losophy, 42;  innate,  44 

Individual,    fundamentality   of,   75 

Instinct,  problem  of,  27;  "instinct 
actions,"  "instinct  feelings,"  27; 
and  physical  organization,  53 

Intellect,  92 

Iron,   72,   80 

James,  William,  on  consciousness 
of  self,  52;  on  nature  of  emo- 
tion, 61,  et  seq. 

Knowledge,  theory  of,  not  under 
discussion  in  this  work,  39;  na- 
ture of,  40 

Lead,  84 

Life,  objective  and  subjective,  27 

Mass    action,    87 
Materialism,  Huxley  against,  45 
Mathematics,  40 
Metabolism,  katabolic,  89 
Metals,  31 
Metaphysics,  28 
Mind,   conception  of,  39 
Mind,    "mind    stuff,"    61 
Montague,  W.  P.,  on  psycho-phys- 
ical parallelism,  41 
Morgan,  C.  Lloyd,  71 

Natural  History,  method  of  study- 
ing, 26 

"Neglect  nothing,"  as  naturalist, 
26,  72 

Nervous  system,  as  "roots  of  psy- 
chology," 46 

Objective,  and  "outer,"  35 

Organismal,  theory  of  conscious- 
ness, 25 

Organization  and  instinct,  53;  and 
emotion,  59 

Oxygen,  as  respiratory  substance, 
44;  latent  attributes  of,  84;  he- 
ireditary,  ontogenic,  and  indi- 
vidual, 90;  activation  of,  91. 

Parallelism,  psycho-physical,  his- 
torical basis  of,  40 


Percepts,  37 

Periodic  law,  in  chemistry,  72 

Personal   consciousness,  35 

Personality,  34,  37,  78;  and  ele- 
mentary substances,  70 

Phases  of  the  cell,  69 

Philosopher's    stone,   31 

Philosophy,  Cartesian,  40 

Phosphorus,  33;  a  "simple,"  32; 
glow  of,  86 

Physical  chemistry,  absence  of  in 
earlier  biology,  46;  and  person- 
ality, 79;  antielementalistic  ten- 
dency of,  84 

Physico-chemical  substances  and 
forces,  in  animal  behavior,  55 

Physiologist,    28 

Pluralism,  philosophical,  37 

Postulates,  40 

Powers,  secret,  of  substances,  43 

Principles,   Alchemist's,  31 

Private  opinion,  35 

Psychic  life,  man's  higher,  26; 
catholicity  of  attitude  toward, 
27. 

Psycho-analysis,  93 

Psychologist,  28 

Psychology,  without  a  soul  and 
without  a  body,  65;  social  and 
domestic,  75 


Radicals,  compound,  in  chemistry, 

86 

Reaction,  chemical  and  neural,  29 
Reason,   as   creator  of  the  world, 

50 

Respiration,    life,    and    conscious- 
ness, 29,  et  seq.;  of  muscles,  89 
"Restlessness,"   mental,   50 
Royce,  J.,  on  internal  and   exter- 
nal, 39;  as  absolute  Idealist,  50 


Salamander,  54 

Scientific  attitude,  difference  be- 
tween, and  philosophic,  50 

Scripps  Institution,  psychology  of 
colony  of,  75 

"Secret  powers"  of  substances,  84 

Self,  and  person,  44;  control,  48; 
development,  48 


Index 


105 


Sellars,  R.  W.,  individuality  in 
percepts,  37;  the  individual  and 
social  psychology,  75 

Society,  and  individual,  75 

Soul,  and  body,  interaction  be- 
tween, 66 

Spirits,  historical  relation  to  es- 
sences, 31;  historical  relation  to 
breath  and  air,  81 

Stout,  O.  P.,  41;  unanalysed  cogni- 
tion in  consciousness,  47;  on 
personality  of  animals,  71 

Sub-conscious,  93 

Subjective,  and  "inner,"  35 


Theory,  of  knowledge,  39;  of  con- 
sciousness, 39 


Transformation,  of  substances,  30 
Transmutation  of  metals,  31 
Truth,   ultimate,   32 

Ultimate  truth,   32 
Uranium,  85 

Wheeler,  W.  M.,  on  problem  of 
instinct,  27;  on  instinct  and  bod- 
ily organization,  54 

Whitman,  C.  O.,  on  relation  be- 
tween instinct  and  structure,  57 

Work,  energy,  power,  force,  85 

World,  external,  46 

Zoologist,  anthropological,  28 


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